From Hamburg: I’m away from the National Press Club for two seconds and I miss out? It’s not quite a case of FOMO, but jeez! On the eve of the Labor’s draconian digital identity laws banning under 16s from accessing social media (and by what I consider to be deliberate extension, introducing a Digital ID system) Labor’s Communications Minister, Anika ...

Our remarkably high living standards from the 1840s onwards came from ordinary people struggling for property rights. They won them, and without this Australia would have achieved nothing. Our land laws fostered our economic development, unlike Argentina’s, for example, where economic performance fell behind that of Australia. As Ian McLean writes, now ...

Just over a year ago, Australians were given 24 hours’ notice to make a submission to the proposed legislation: Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Bill [Provisions]. I made a submission, opposing it, of course. I didn’t expect my efforts to make any difference, but I contributed anyway. Interestingly, my submission doesn’t appear in the ...

You’re either in front of Mr S or you are behind. It was just six weeks ago that Steerpike reported that staff within Tory HQ were expecting to soon leave their longtime base on Matthew Parker Street. With the party’s lease up next summer, a new headquarters is needed. And today, the Conservatives have told their members that they have bought and now ...

If you’ve ever dramatically broken up with an ex, only to find, to your miserable disbelief, that they keep popping up in the most inconvenient circumstances, you may feel a degree of sympathy with the royals as regards Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. A few weeks after he was stripped of his titles and ordered to leave Royal Lodge, he may now be the Andrew ...

These days I barely know what my own handwriting looks like; about my friends, the knowledge is all but lost. Seeing their pen strokes has grown rare. But for a brief period each winter that odd intimacy returns as Christmas cards – some with messages, most with just a scribbled name – land on my mat. I adore receiving cards. Even ones from people I ...

The regime of North Korea has continued to exploit the war in Ukraine to spread its propaganda. This week we learnt that Ukrainian children, abducted by Russia, are being sent to an infamous North Korean summer camp. The children have reportedly been taught to ‘destroy Japanese imperialists’ and heard from North Korean soldiers who destroyed the USS ...

Huge crowds of locals, plus families and friends of the crew, greeted the return home of the nation’s flagship aircraft carrier, HMS Prince of Wales, last week. It was a fitting climax to a flawless, highly significant, eight-month, 40,000-nautical-mile deployment to the Far East. Sailors spoke about the emotion of their homecoming, pride in their hard ...

The righteous were remembered because they were few. The rest were silent. Now history is doing what history does, it’s repeating itself. Every so often, usually at the end of a long dinner or after a particularly bleak headline, I hear a familiar reassurance from fellow Jews. A delusional reassurance eating away at our community. One so entrenched, so ...