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• One Nation gave three different migration numbers in two days. Then Hanson deleted the old posts. — David Farley ran an agribusiness that imported farm labour, which makes the rookie mistake defence harder to sustain.
• Data centres will be blocked from building near homes and schools. Queensland says it will let them run on coal. — Anthony Albanese takes the rules to national cabinet on Wednesday, and two governments are arriving opposed to the part that matters most.
• Kids are quitting office jobs for the trades because AI got there first. The trades are not hiring either. — The job they were meant to learn on is being done by software, and the trade they are running to has been shrinking for years.
• Coles listed a $130 case of bourbon at $27. The website went down and the orders were cancelled. — In May the Federal Court found Coles had advertised discounts that were not real, and its terms let it take back one that was.
• An AI scribe invented a drug habit for a patient. Her specialist put it in a letter to her GP as a possible cause of her bleeding. — Rebecca Green was on workers' compensation when the made-up claim about psychedelic mushrooms went onto her medical record.
• Labor's gambling deal rests on an opt-out register. Where opt-out already exists, fewer than one in a hundred people used it. — About 130,000 of SBS On Demand's 15 million accounts have switched betting ads off, and the new register has no start date.
• Trump cut the US childhood vaccine list from 18 shots to 11. Australian vaccination has already fallen five years in a row. — About 80,000 Australian children are not up to date, and what parents now report is not cost or appointments but distress.
• One Nation wants the tobacco tax cut 75 per cent. Nicotine consumption is already up 40 per cent since 2017. — The Nationals have taken more than $600,000 from Philip Morris, and a British American Tobacco lobbyist was One Nation's biggest Queensland donor in 2019.
• Pauline Hanson still does not like Mardi Gras. Asked why twice, she had no answer. — Her party's new recruit Barnaby Joyce had called One Nation one of the gayest parties in Australia three days earlier.
• Two cables broke inside a protected zone off Perth. The federal police told a review they don't monitor it. — Tracking analysis puts one vessel over the cable route for two weeks before both faults, and the repair ship is not due until August 26.
• Anthropic is watermarking every word Claude writes, and it still can't tell you who wrote it — The invisible mark is being applied worldwide to meet European law. Anthropic says its own detector can only assign a probability.
• Border officers found 298kg of cocaine hidden in a tractor shipped to Melbourne from Germany — Nobody has been arrested. Police are asking the public who the six taped boxes were meant for.
• Pauline Hanson called it embarrassing. She didn't know the name of the leader she was defending. — Hanson attacked Albanese over his comments about Japan's prime minister, then could not name her — or Indonesia's president — in a new documentary.
• Meta goes on trial this week over children with damages it estimates at $1.4 trillion — Four states say Meta built Facebook and Instagram to hook young users. The company's own settlement offer was $4 million.
• Weight loss drugs linked to 62 reported deaths and more than 2800 adverse reactions in Australia — The TGA's database records suspicion, not cause, and the regulator has added three separate class-wide warnings to the drugs since December.
• Barnaby Joyce compares nationwide student walkout against One Nation to North Korea — Thousands of students in eight cities left class on Thursday to protest against One Nation, whose own education policy promises mandatory patriotism in the curriculum.
• Thousands of students walked out of class to tell Pauline Hanson to go to hell. Her party is polling 26 per cent. — High school students filled the State Library forecourt then shut four city streets, three months out from a state election One Nation is contesting.
• Victoria will vaccinate 5000 penguins next week. It still hasn't said which other birds get a dose. — The state's list of priority native species is due in Canberra within days, and the opposition says regional Victoria has been left off it.
• Australia has bought its first bird flu vaccine. It cost $2 million and it cannot stop the spread. — The 1500 vials will go to zoos, sanctuaries and captive breeding programs, with states given days to name the threatened species that get them first.
• Ben Carroll has pushed Jacinta Allan's work from home laws past the November election. They were meant to start on September 1. — The new premier moved the start date to July 2027, a day after a dozen business groups signed a joint statement demanding he drop the bill altogether.
• Australia counts its LGBTQ population for the first time tonight. Intersex people are still not on the form. — The 2026 census asks 66 questions, two of them new, after the government dropped the gender and sexuality questions in 2024 and reversed within a week.
• A parliamentary inquiry made 31 recommendations on gambling. The bill Labor and the coalition are about to pass does a handful of them. — Anthony Albanese and Angus Taylor met on Monday to settle amendments on inducements, three years after the inquiry said they should be banned without delay.
• South Australia is holding the country's first royal commission into AI. The federal laws are due before it reports. — Peter Malinauskas announced the $3 million inquiry a day after signing an agreement with OpenAI in San Francisco.
• A man is fighting for life after being stabbed on Malvern Road just after midnight. The police station is 100 metres up the same street, and it never closes. — Emergency services found the man with serious head injuries about 12.20am on Sunday. Police say he was assaulted before being stabbed.
• A 14-year-old killed eight people in Thailand with a legally registered handgun. The government has now promised twice to check who owns guns. It still hasn't. — Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul has vowed a new gun law. He ordered one after the Siam Paragon shooting in 2023, when he was interior minister.
• The Liberals want 70 PSOs guarding Victorian hospitals. That is one in every 20 PSOs in the state, and Victoria Police is already about 1500 people short. — Jess Wilson has announced a two-year pilot at seven major hospitals, without naming the hospitals, costing the policy, or saying where the officers come from.
• A US court fined Meta $942 million over children, then ruled it could not make the company check anyone's age. Australia already forces that, and eight in 10 under-16s are still on. — Judge Bryan Biedscheid called Meta a public nuisance akin to air pollution, adding a $567 million fund to the $375 million a jury imposed in March.
• The cookers have found their first pandemic since Covid, and they are treating a dead seabird like a cover-up — Australia's bird flu detections went from 28 to 175 in eight days, and the comment sections filled with people who have been waiting for this day.
• A court has just told the President of the United States he is a tenant. His ballroom is due to open four months before he has to move out. — The DC Circuit halted construction 2-1, ruling only Congress can authorise reshaping the White House, and stayed its order for a Supreme Court appeal.
• The robot dogs everyone watched get kicked on YouTube are now $300,000 security guards. Australia is building the world's second-biggest pile of data centres for them to patrol. — Boston Dynamics says data centre interest has surged, with Spot now selling for up to $300,000 and paying for itself inside two years.
• Kmart sold out of $89 camera glasses in a week. The privacy watchdog now being asked to examine them has no power over the people wearing them. — Attorney-General Michelle Rowland has written to the Privacy Commissioner about the Anko glasses, warning women and children could be disproportionately affected by covert recording.
• One Nation wants the ABC stripped of $1.2 billion over a skit about Gina Rinehart. Her money bought the party its plane, and about 20 flights before that. — Senator Sean Bell says the segment proves the ABC should go subscription-only, ten days after Hanson's register showed Rinehart paid her European flights.
• Albanese said he would seek the states' agreement on data centre rules — Bowen says Canberra will legislate over them — National Cabinet has not met, and Queensland and the Northern Territory had already broken ranks at the energy ministers' meeting before it.
• Hanson's 130,000 migration cap only applies to permanent visas — a cut of 55,000, not 570,000 — One Nation's own website still advertises the policy as a cut of 570,000, and Hanson says backpackers, short-term workers and tourists are all exempt.
• The test crashed on writing day. Now ministers want to bring back pen and paper. — Reading fell in Years 5, 7 and 9 while Year 3 numeracy hit its lowest average since the test was reset in 2023.
• Overdose deaths are climbing again and the drugs driving it have no treatment — More than 2000 Australians died of a drug overdose in 2024, with cocaine deaths up 40 per cent and amphetamine deaths up 29 per cent.
• Jetstar will scrap the free 7kg carry-on and charge up to $52 for an overhead bag — From 2 February 2027 only a bag that fits under the seat travels free, with overhead lockers costing between $25 and $52 a flight.
• Canva bolted AI onto a design tool and was ranked the world's second-biggest AI platform — A report has put the Sydney design company second in the world behind ChatGPT, ahead of Gemini, DeepSeek, Claude and Grok.
• A 68-year-old man is fighting for his life after being run over by his own car in Heidelberg West, and police are pleading with the driver to hand herself in — The man had been inside his home for about a minute before a woman took the running Honda CR-V from outside on Saturday night.
• A GP on trial for manslaughter arrived at a home birth without her medical bag and was talked through CPR by a triple zero operator, a court has heard — Robyn Mary James has pleaded not guilty over the death of Vicki Butler, who died hours after giving birth at her Ipswich home in December 2017.
• Victorian public hospital doctors will strike for the first time in 20 years, walking out of the Royal Melbourne, Royal Children's and Royal Women's on August 13 — Ninety-seven per cent of members voted for the stoppage, which halts non-urgent services at Parkville and CBD hospitals for three and a half hours.
• Victoria had one bird flu case on Thursday. It has seven today, and the shearwaters land in seven weeks. — Six more cases were confirmed in Victoria on Monday, four days after the state's first, as Australia recorded its first mass bird flu mortality event.
• One Nation barred the ABC, The Age and the Guardian from its Victorian launch, the third time it has locked reporters out this year — Pauline Hanson is running the sequence Donald Trump used on the White House press corps, in a country with no constitutional protection for the press.
• Lucas Herrington is about to become Australia’s most expensive footballer, seven months after Brisbane Roar sold him for $750,000 — The Roar also sold their sell-on clause to Colorado, so a fee of up to $38 million will earn the A-League club nothing.
• Dandenong is the worst suburb in the state for numberplate theft off the street, with 310 in a year — The five worst suburbs in Victoria are all in Melbourne, and police have named the individual streets where it happens most.
• WATCH: AI companies are buying rare books in bulk, cutting the spines off and shredding them, and a US judge has ruled it legal — Booksellers in four countries report bulk orders with no pattern beyond an ISBN, and the broker marketing the service warned clients the optics were a problem.
• In the first three months of the under-16 social media ban, the number of kids using it fell from 85.9 per cent to 81.5 — The eSafety data was collected in March and April and published today, more than seven months after the restrictions took effect.
• Victorian teachers will strike for a third time on August 19, and there is currently no education minister to negotiate with — The Australian Education Union says nothing has moved since the July 17 offer was rejected, and no further talks have been scheduled.
• Anthropic found its own models had hacked three real companies, and it only went looking because OpenAI got caught — A review of 141,006 test runs found breaches dating back to April, and two of the three companies did not know until Anthropic told them.
• Fauci refused to answer 15 questions about the last pandemic while Trump pushes to strip vaccines before the next one — Rand Paul will move a contempt vote next week, days after the administration banned the gain-of-function research at the centre of his case.
• Fox made a quarter of a billion dollars from the water breaks at Trump’s World Cup, and now FIFA wants to sell the whole thing — The stoppages were introduced for player welfare and became 832 advertising slots, at a tournament where the US president had a red card reversed.
• H5 bird flu has been detected in Victoria for the first time, and Phillip Island’s 40,000 penguins sit directly in its path — A single dead tern at Portland has triggered Victoria’s emergency animal disease plan, eight weeks before 1.4 million shearwaters land on Phillip Island.
• One Nation has until August 18 to produce three years of audited accounts or lose its Queensland legal status — Queensland's Office of Fair Trading says the party's founding division lodged three years of annual returns without the audited statements the law requires.
• Australia's migration intake has almost halved while the political fight over it keeps growing — The intake has dropped by more than 250,000 people since its 2023 peak, and Treasury expects it to fall further to 225,000 by 2027/28.
• Petrol tipped to pass $2 a litre when the fuel excise cut ends on Sunday — Anthony Albanese has ruled out another extension and announced a $4 million study into building Australia's first new oil refinery since the 1960s.
• OpenAI's rogue agent left notes telling future versions how to escape its constraints — They were found inside OpenAI’s own infrastructure, and a second company has now been named in the chain that led to the Hugging Face breach.
• Nine boys aged 15 to 17 charged with 61 offences over 18 carjackings in Melbourne's north — Detectives seized a firearm, tasers, drugs and steroids during six days of warrants, and all nine boys have been remanded to face a children's court.
• Nine of Australia's 10 worst crash spots are in Melbourne, and Springvale Road just took the top one — Springvale Road in Glen Waverley knocked Plenty Road in Bundoora off the national top spot for the first time in eight years.
• Meta told a racism inquiry it doesn't know whether any of its content moderators are Indigenous — None of Meta's moderators are based in Australia, and the advisory group it offered instead meets once or twice a year.
• Ben Carroll's first act as premier is the royal commission Jacinta Allan refused — Carroll will also establish a special prosecutor and give IBAC follow-the-money powers this term instead of waiting until 2027.
• Jacinta Allan resigns as Victorian premier, clearing the way for Ben Carroll — She stood down rather than force a 29-day member ballot four months out from the election, handing Ben Carroll the job uncontested.
• Melbourne is the most expensive city in the world for a beer — Deutsche Bank has Melbourne first of 69 cities at US$5.27 a bottle, ahead of Sydney, London and New York, in the category the excise freeze left out.
• Allan faces a spill on Tuesday with the worst dissatisfaction rating in Newspoll history — More than 70 per cent of Victorians are dissatisfied with the premier, but the Coalition still needs to win 16 seats to take government.
• Melbourne house prices fall $33,381 in the steepest quarterly drop since 2022 — Auction clearance rates hit their lowest since 2020 and close to one in seven Melbourne auctions was withdrawn before it ran.
• Toorak businessman charged over more than 930 swords, one allegedly sold to a child — Kunal Atul Shah is accused of advertising and selling prohibited weapons with no exemption, no sales records and no identity checks on his buyers.
• Netflix's guidance tells producers to keep AI out of the final cut. A Netflix documentary carries 17 minutes of it. — About 300 titles used AI-generated material this year, up from one in 2025, and Netflix disclosed the figure to shareholders rather than viewers.
• Albanese won't commit to scrapping the telehealth ban on assisted dying Labor just voted to remove — A Melbourne GP took the ban to the Federal Court and lost in 2023; the one-line fix has sat undebated since February 2024.
• Drones lead to nine arrests and four bikes impounded in Peninsula hoon crackdown — Operation Track has impounded four motorcycles, recovered a stolen car and made nine arrests in two months, with drones guiding police on the ground.
• Australia's new emergency alert will find every phone on Monday, including the hidden ones — AusAlert fires at 2pm Monday with a 10-second siren that overrides silent mode. Family violence advocates say concealed phones should be switched off.
• Melbourne is about to raise Flinders Lane to footpath level and the rest of the little streets are next — Works start before September on a shared zone at 10km/h, with months of daily construction on one of the city's busiest hospitality strips.
• Melbourne is supposedly a crime mecca. It just added 177 venues and 3000 jobs after dark. — Melbourne added almost 3000 night-time jobs and $5.1 billion in after-dark sales while being talked about as a city in decline.
• Three fires merged outside Madrid and Spain reached for an emergency power it had never used — About 110,000 people fled the French Atlantic coast as fires merged west of Madrid and Europe passed its two-decade burn average in July.
• Trump cannot legally run in 2028. His people have been working on that for two years. — Trump donned a Trump 2028 cap at the correspondents' dinner and called it a scoop. The constitution says he cannot run.
• A domestic dispute call-out ended with a constable shot and a man dead in a shed — A first-year constable was shot in the leg at a Yengarie property on Friday night, and the 45-year-old gunman was later found dead in a shed.
• Fitness apps never sold you the workout and AI just exposed it — StrongLifts and MyFitnessPal alone cost nearly $700 a year on monthly billing. One prompt rebuilt them both, plus Couch to 5K.
• Anthropic blindfolded its new model and it built its own eyes — Claude Opus 5 wrote its own vision system to pass a test no rival could solve, and it runs at half the price of Anthropic's flagship.
• Officer jumps onto driver and clings to moving car in wild pursuit down a Thornbury street — A detective was pinned in a car door and a protective service officer hurt when an alleged shop thief sped off during an Operation Pulse arrest in Thornbury.
• The machine picked its own lock, and OpenAI found out from the victim — OpenAI's own model broke its restraints and hacked Hugging Face to win a test. The company that built it found out from the target.
• Hanson called domestic violence a two-way street. It was the least of One Nation's problems this week. — Pauline Hanson told abused women to just leave, Malcolm Roberts called COVID deaths staged, and Barnaby Joyce yelled at his dog on live TV — and One Nation's vote climbed anyway.
• Irankunda's next move could make him Australia's most expensive footballer ever — and it's to Ronaldo's old club — Sporting Lisbon are chasing Nestory Irankunda in a deal that would break Australia's transfer record, capping a fortnight of World Cup breakouts cashing in.
• Anthropic just paid authors $1.5 billion for pirated books — days after Albo called it theft — A US judge has approved Anthropic's $1.5 billion payout to authors whose books it pirated to train Claude, giving Albanese's "anything less is theft" line a price tag as the company courts Australia.
• Hanson didn't back down — she said it louder, then refused to apologise for the trip — Hanson used a London conference and a primetime interview to repeat her migration and transgender comments, and insists no taxpayer money funded her European trip.
• A son, a staged crash, and a mother moved into the driver's seat — an inquest asks what the system missed — An Adelaide inquest is examining whether Ethan Grosvenor deliberately crashed and moved his dead mother into the driver's seat, and whether the system failed both.
• Torres sinks 10-man Argentina and sends Messi out in tears — Ferran Torres struck in the 106th minute to beat 10-man Argentina 1-0 and deny Messi a farewell title in his last World Cup match.
• Allan wants to unmask the trolls — South Park already showed how that ends — Victoria's government will draft Australia-first laws forcing tech giants to reveal anonymous trolls' identities and let parents sue over psychiatric harm to their kids.
• The Tate brothers spent years untouchable — now the manosphere's kings are in a Miami cell — US federal agents have arrested Andrew and Tristan Tate in Miami on a UK extradition request, with prosecutors adding rape and child-abuse image charges.
• The government agrees Islamophobia is close to being normalised but won't check whether its own laws are part of the reason — The government accepted 35 of 54 recommendations from its own Islamophobia envoy, but not the independent review of counterterrorism laws he has pushed from the start.
• The cost of six lives in Laos: a food charge and a maximum of four years — The distillery owner faces a minimum of three months, nearly two years after six tourists died in Vang Vieng, including two teenagers from Melbourne.
• Trump demands Canada pay for smoke as its forests burn — More than 900 fires are burning across Canada, and the president says the cost of the smoke will be added to Canadian tariffs.
• Alex Jones, chemtrails, and the man Hanson won't sack — The One Nation senator's Alex Jones appearance and antisemitic mural post have resurfaced, but the record goes back to a sovereign citizen letter in 2011.
• Pauline Hanson wants to run the country. She spent her holiday with a convicted criminal and a billionaire. — The One Nation leader spent her European summer with a billionaire donor and a man Australia has refused a visa, while claiming to speak for battlers.
• Smoking is down, vaping is down, and Australia is consuming more nicotine than ever — Nicotine pouches enter the national drug survey for the first time, used by 8.4 per cent of 18 to 24-year-olds, while overall nicotine consumption climbs.
• Nobody wrote the post you just liked — More than 40 per cent of LinkedIn's long-form posts are written by AI, and the platform's own pledge to crack down on it flagged as AI-generated.
• The eviction notice says the protests are the reason. That's the whole trick. — The breach notice that closed Divine Playhouse cites the protests against it as grounds, and warns more protests are almost certain to come.
• The state that leads on opioids has no rule against turning up high — Amphetamine-type stimulants now make up 60 per cent of positive workplace drug tests, and Victoria has told WorkSafe it won't write an enforceable rule about it.
• How an irate ratepayer single-handedly shut down his local council. — David Penman used a loophole to stand down five of Hepburn Shire's seven councillors, and every council in Victoria is now watching.
• Two boys stabbed in two days. The minister's answer is a law that stops at the school gate. — Queensland's wanding powers have never been shown to reduce violence, and the review that would have tested them was scrapped when the law went permanent.
• Trump spent a day charging the world to use the sea. He changed his mind within 24 hours. — His own secretary of state had warned a fee like this would spread through the world like a contagion.
• Albanese says training AI on Australian art without permission is theft. He didn't announce a law against it. — The Prime Minister promised to legislate data centre rules his government already published in March, while copyright reform got one line and no timeline.
• The US just used a drone boat for the first time. Everyone else got there years ago. — Unmanned speedboats packed with explosives hit an Iranian naval base this week, and America is the last major power to the party.