As I write this on 11 January 2026, Australia’s in the grip of a brutal heatwave and Victoria is on fire. Houses have been lost, farms destroyed and people are unaccounted for as out-of-control fires ...

“We can no longer lend our credibility to an organization that has lost its integrity,” write four scientists and administrators who recently resigned from the NIH.

Australia has a long history of diplomacy and peacekeeping when things go pear-shaped. We need to saddle up again Donald Trump has commanded a precision military operation against a neighbour he didn’t like. Venezuela’s president was abducted and is now in detention from which he is unlikely to emerge. But Trump’s short-term tactical success has come at the expense of the complete destruction of the rules of international behaviour. Things were already bad. They have now gone pear-shaped. Global lawlessness prevails. That’s a massive price for the international community to pay, since it licenses other powers – Russia and China in particular – to act in the same way. Russia has already. And China may well be tempted to. Trump’s determination to dominate the western hemisphere implicitly invites Xi Jinping to do the same in the eastern hemisphere. And it confirms the licence already extended by the US to Israel. Continue reading...

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