☕️ Latest on landslide in PNG

…to everyone except the possums in my roof last night. Please take your arguments (mating??) elsewhere.

“We are a racist country, let’s face it. We always have been and it’s very depressing.”
What ABC political report Laura Tingle reportedly said at a Sydney Writers’ Festival event over the weekend, according to The Sydney Morning Herald.

$400 million
How much funding Western Australian Premier Roger Cook has announced for family and domestic violence prevention. It comes after a Perth mother and daughter were murdered in their home on Friday, allegedly by a man looking for his ex-wife. Cook said more needed to be done to "tackle the root causes of family and domestic violence.”

1934
The Dionne Quintuplets were born in Canada. They became “the first ever quintuplets known to have survived infancy”. The five sisters weighed a combined total of around 6kg.

Hundreds are feared dead after a landslide in remote Papua New Guinea (PNG).

The landslide struck the Kaokalam village in PNG’s Enga Province early Friday morning.

Initial reports estimated up to 100 people were killed during the incident. However, local authorities have told the United Nations they estimate 2,000 people were buried by the landslide.

The PNG Defence Force is leading ongoing search and rescue efforts in Kaokalam, about 600 kilometres northwest of Port Moresby.

Rescuers were delayed in reaching the village due to its remote location.

The flow of essential relief items like food and water has also been hampered by cut off roads and shifting terrain around the site of the incident.

The Australian Government has committed to supporting PNG officials with recovery efforts from the landslide.

Energy Minister Chris Bowen said the Government would “be in touch with PNG to express and ask what support they need”.

It’s not yet clear what an aid package from Australia could include, as authorities continue to assess the scale of damage.

The Government is planning to strengthen hate speech laws by criminalising insults based on gender, sexuality, race, and religion.

It comes amid increased reports of antisemitism and Islamophobia.

The Government put its hate speech laws on hold in February, but has now said it will introduce new legislation in Parliament later this year.

The former Morrison Government attempted to pass a Religious Discrimination Act, which featured some protections from hate speech, before the 2022 election. It failed to pass.

After the election, the Albanese Government promised to introduce similar legislation.

However, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said that he would not pass the reforms without bipartisan support and parked the proposed legislation.

Since then, the Government has decided to split up the legislation into two parts: the hate speech components and the religious discrimination laws.

Shadow Immigration Minister Dan Tehan said the Opposition would work with the Government on the hate speech laws, and said antisemitism in Australia needed to be addressed.

The Government now plans to table legislation that would create criminal penalties for hate speech, beyond the civil penalties that currently exist.

In a statement to TDA, Attorney General Mark Dreyfus said: “We are committed to protecting the community from those who promote extremism, hatred or seek to incite violence.”

The drafting of the law is still underway, but it is expected to be tabled in August.

LGBTQ+, disability, ethnic group, and women’s advocates have been consulted by the Government on the proposed changes to the hate speech laws.

Shadow Attorney-General Michaelia Cash was shown the draft legislation in February, but the details haven’t been made public. She criticised the process as a “mess entirely of the Government’s making”.

Pressure is building for the Government to strengthen hate speech laws in the wake of rising antisemitism and Islamophobia since the war in Gaza began.

Late last week, the front fence at a Jewish school in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs was vandalised with an antisemitic phrase.

Victoria Police are investigating who is behind the graffiti, saying it “takes reports of racial or religious-based crime extremely seriously”.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said there is “no place for this in Australia or anywhere else”.

Jewish Labor MP Josh Burns, whose seat is in Melbourne, urged the broader community and leaders to call out the “blatant antisemitism”.

Victorian Liberal Senator Sarah Henderson labelled the graffiti “sickening”. She added: “The ugly tide of antisemitic hate and incitement in our community must stop.”

The Islamophobia Register Australia said the number of incidents reported to it “has continued to spike at an alarming rate”.

The Register highlighted a 39-fold rise in reported incidents on university campuses around the country compared to figures prior to 7 October.

The Register said it “is deeply concerned about this surge and its impact on Muslim students, staff, and faculty”.

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Referred to as the “echidnapus,” the monotreme species has characteristics of both the echidna and platypus.

Fossils dating back over 100 million years were found in Lightning Ridge, NSW. Professor Tim Flannery said: “It’s like discovering a whole new civilisation.”

Nicki Minaj was forced to cancel a show in Manchester this week after she was arrested for alleged drug possession in Amsterdam.

The rapper live-blogged her experience with Netherlands police on X and Instagram, alleging a conspiracy to sabotage her ‘Pink Friday 2’ tour.

“Soooooo many ppl are mad that [the tour is] this successful”, Minaj said.

Minaj apologised to her fans and said she’s “going to create an added bonus” for those who had tickets to the Manchester show.

Her other shows in England will go ahead as planned.

In the last week, there have been two major incidents of turbulence hitting commercial flights, causing injury. On Sunday, 12 people were injured on a Qatar Airways Doha to Dublin flight while in the air over Türkiye.

In today’s podcast, we talk to Professor Dr Jason Middleton, the Head of UNSW's Department of Aviation between 1995 and 2017, about why we’re seeing a sudden spike in incidents of turbulence, and why you should always wear a seatbelt.