The Delhi High Court has stayed proceedings in a criminal defamation case filed against Sudarshan TV and its editor Suresh Chavhanke in connection with allegations that his channel made false accusations against a madrasa. The case against Chavhanke was filed by Mohammed Tufail Khan
The Trump Intervention That Got the DOJ Off Live Nation’s Back Antitrust case started out aiming to force the concert giant to sell Ticketmaster. After two White House meetings, a deal kept the company intact. Published on: Aug 24, 2026, 14:02:07 IST WSJ Prefer HTon Google Share via Copy link The
China said on Sunday (August 23, 2026) it was postponing its planned ambitious Chang'e-7 lunar mission, which was set to carry out explorations including searching for water ice on the moon. The Chang'e-7 spacecraft was originally set to lift off in the coming days from the Wenchang Space Launch
Canada’s Carney Puts His ‘No Deal Is Better Than a Bad Deal’ Doctrine to the Test The prime minister ’s approach has broad support from the Canadian public and his political opponents, but it isn’t without risks. Published on: Aug 24, 2026, 14:05:27 IST WSJ Prefer HTon Google Share via
An Indian national was killed in a shooting incident in New York on Friday night, said the Indian consulate general in the city. The man, Gurdeep Singh, was killed on Crescent Street in the city’s Brooklyn area, in what police believe may have been a road rage incident, CBS News reported
A group of former cricket captains, including Indian batting legend Sunil Gavaskar and one of England's longest-serving skippers Sir Alastair Cook, have called on Pakistan to ensure its ex-PM Imran Khan be given proper care while in custody. The cricketer-turned-politician has been in jail since
Fewer than 20 commodity vessels transited the Strait of Hormuz at the weekend, shipping data showed on Monday (August 24, 2026), as Iranian and U.S. blockades restrict traffic through the chokepoint for energy shipments. Four vessels crossed the strait on Sunday (August 23, 2026)
India had asked the United States not to allow reporters to ask questions during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s meeting with President Donald Trump on the sidelines of the G7 summit in France in June, US Ambassador to India Sergio Gor said on Saturday
How Australian politics descended into ugliness after Bondi shooting
How Australian politics descended into ugliness after Bondi shooting
Thursday had been earmarked for Australians to mourn the victims of last month's Bondi shootings.
Those who had lost loved ones in the antisemitic attacks wanted it to be a chance to remember the dead, and spread light and kindness in their honour.
Instead, it was a day dominated by a political row resulting in the collapse of the opposition coalition.
"I mean, you would have thought they could have put this off for 24 hours," veteran political commentator Malcolm Farr told the BBC.
It's at the very least unfortunate timing and shows a certain amount of self-indulgence.
The fight - which centred around reforms sparked by the tragedy - looks set to sink two leaders and trash their parties' electoral chances, and caps off what many Australians say has been a disappointing month of politics.
When two gunmen opened fire on an event marking the Jewish festival of Hanukkah at Bondi Beach, killing 15 people - including a 10-year-old child - the recriminations began almost immediately.
The turnaround was amazing in the way they [politicians] politicised it," says Bondi local Kass Hill, 52. "The fingerpointing isn't solving anything.
While families were waiting to bury their loved ones, a conveyer belt of politicians - including the opposition leader - visited the scene to apportion blame. Populist leaders came to rail against immigration. Prominent businesspeople popped by to pose with flowers.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, accused by many Jewish Australians of ignoring their concerns ahead of the attack, spent the weeks after it dismissing calls from many in the community for a national inquiry into antisemitism.
He was repeatedly heckled in public, arriving at a memorial to a tidal wave of boos and cries of "You're not welcome". "You might as well go to a jihadist nation where you can fit in," one person shouted. Looming over the crowd, a large screen read "a night of unity".
Criticised as being overly defensive and slow to listen, Albanese has in turn rebuked his parliamentary rivals for "playing politics" with tragedy.
The 14 December Bondi attack was Australia's worst mass shooting since the Port Arthur massacre in 1996, when 35 people were killed, but the responses to the tragedies couldn't be more different.
Then Prime Minister John Howard visited the scene of the shooting in Tasmania to lay wreaths together with opposition leaders, who shortly afterwards united to help him pass firearms laws that made Australia a world leader on gun control.
"Australian society and politics is very different than it was 30 years ago and we're just a far more divided society," says John Warhurst, an emeritus professor of political science at the Australian National University.
There are a number of reasons why this attack has divided people in ways Port Arthur didn't - including the already fraught debate raging in Australia over Israel, Gaza and antisemitism, according to Mark Kenny, a political columnist and host of the Democracy Sausage podcast.
"Then this event lobs into that, [and] I think it led to it being immediately politicised," he told the BBC.
Since the 7 October 2023 attack on Israel by Hamas and protests in Australia against Israel's war on Gaza which followed, Albanese has consistently been accused of failing to do enough to stamp out antisemitism. The Executive Council of Australian Jewry says antisemitic incidents have increased from an average of 342 before the 7 October attacks in 2023 to 1,654 last year.
Likewise, he's been accused of not doing enough to call out Israel's actions in Gaza, which UN experts have called genocide and Israel denies.
Hours after the Bondi shooting, the antisemitism commissioner appointed by Albanese linked it to the pro-Palestinian protests that have regularly taken place in Sydney and which Jewish leaders have lobbied against.
It began on 9 October 2023 at the Sydney Opera House," Jillian Segal said in a statement. "Now death has reached Bondi Beach.
Investigators have not said there is any link between the alleged gunmen and the pro-Palestinian movement, instead alleging the pair were inspired by the jihadist group Islamic State, with the younger of the father-son duo on intelligence agencies' radars for a period in 2019.
As it was after Port Arthur, gun reform was the first thing on the legislative agenda after the Bondi attack.
"We know that one of these terrorists held a firearm licence and had six guns, in spite of living in the middle of Sydney's suburbs... There's no reason why someone in that situation needed that many guns," Albanese said as he announced a suite of changes in the following days.
Unlike Port Arthur, when the measures were broadly popular, Albanese's focus on gun laws was immediately attacked by the Liberal opposition and parts of the Jewish community as a distraction from what they view as the real cause of the attack – antisemitism. Even Howard, the architect of the 1996 reforms, came out to suggest they were an "attempted diversion".
"That kind of 'either or ism' is a feature about politics these days probably everywhere in the West. Everything becomes supercharged and divisive," says Kenny.
There's just this fundamental lack of trust that's almost like we're in the grip of a toxic cynicism that means that motives of political leaders… the first instinct is to question them, to regard them as disingenuous.
The recent decision by a festival in Adelaide to disinvite a Palestinian-Australian author – leading ultimately to the collapse of the entire writers' week portion of the event – due to "sensitivities" after Bondi and her "past statements" is also a sign of how tense the current circumstances are, adds Kenny.
Demands for immediate action on antisemitism were loud in the days after the attack, and Albanese did soon announce a crackdown on hate speech, backed by the antisemitism commissioner.
But some critics said the measures would impinge on free speech, including the right to criticise Israel, and on protest, while others argued they did not go far enough in protecting other minorities.
"[It's] a can of worms," says Warhurst, noting that there has never been "an easy agreement on finding where that balance lies" between free speech and hate speech.
Now is the worst time, I think, to be trying to resolve those sorts of issues because you are doing it fairly quickly and you're doing it in a heated environment.
The hate speech laws had the backing of the Jewish community, but many felt it was not enough - with several of the victims' families pushing Albanese to call a royal commission, Australia's most powerful form of independent inquiry.
For weeks, Albanese argued the measures already announced were enough and that a royal commission would be the wrong tool to unpick what had happened. It could give a platform to antisemites, he said.
Royal commissions had not been launched into previous tragedies like Port Arthur, Albanese pointed out, comments which were widely dismissed. Promised reviews of intelligence agencies and law enforcement similarly did nothing to dissuade those calling for the inquiry.
Their pleas were mirrored by a coordinated campaign of letter writing that featured on the front pages of right-wing newspapers. "I don't think it's controversial to say that the News Limited and other parts of the media were certainly stirring the pot," says Warhurst.
Albanese's arguments against a royal commission were "really hard to make in these circumstances", says Kenny, and it backfired on him when he was ultimately forced to reverse course on the issue.
Analysts have also suggested his reluctance may have been down to fears it could become complex, controversial and divisive. It could invite discussion of the war in Gaza, while potentially excluding examination of Islamophobia – which exploded after Bondi, with The Islamophobia Register Australia recording a 740% rise in incidents by early January - when many Labor MPs have large Muslim electorates.
There was likely also a "reluctance to cave to the opposition", Farr believes: opposition leader Sussan Ley had vociferously demanded the royal commission, asking what Albanese was "hiding", and revelled in his backflip.
It is fair to say that, before December's attack, Ley had been struggling to land a punch on the government and assert authority over her own party. In the weeks before the shooting, some pundits were even predicting her imminent ousting.
"The Bondi attacks offered her an opportunity to prosecute a very strong case against the government," says Kenny.
But any momentum she gained over the royal commission collapsed this week when she failed to rally her Coalition behind the very hate speech laws she had so loudly demanded Albanese quickly implement.
By Thursday - the national day of mourning for the Bondi attacks - things had fallen apart.
The National Party announced they were leaving the coalition, having refused to vote for the legislation despite a shadow cabinet agreement. They, despite earlier calls for haste, said they had not been given enough time to examine the proposals which they said could threaten free speech.
On his way out the door, Nationals leader David Littleproud suggested the only way his party would consider returning to the fold was if Ley was dumped, leaving her already shaky leadership hanging by a thread.
"I'm quite sure there are people... who are polishing their shoes and tightening the knot on their ties to step forward should that vacancy occur or be forced," says Farr.
However, Littleproud's bold ultimatum could be an overstep which costs him his own job, with mutterings that Liberals wouldn't accept him as a leader in any future coalition either.
But then, it seems all of Australia's politicians may be on shakier ground.
The posturing of the main parties over the past month has left a bitter taste in the mouths of many Australians. In a poll released earlier this week, Albanese's net approval rating had plunged to minus 11 from his previous score of zero in November, while Ley's approval rating - never high - barely budged at minus 28.
The repeated calls for unity by politicians who simultaneously fail to heed their own statements will not have gone unnoticed, and Thursday's display of political infighting is unlikely to improve the fortunes of any party, says Farr.
It will reinforce the view of so many Australians who already are cynical about what politicians, no matter their party, actually represent and will reinforce the belief that politicians, MPs, just stand for themselves rather than the national good.
Source: BBC
Related Posts: World
Former Australian captain Greg Chappell with the support of 20 other former international skippers appealed to the Pakistan Government led by Prime Minister Muhammad Shehbaz Sharif, to provide ‘humane treatment and proper medical care’ for Imran Khan
11 hours ago
The shock resignation of Tata Sons chairman N Chandrasekaran earlier this month has left corporate India's top job vacant. But finding his successor will be no easy task for the country's most revered conglomerate, whose sprawling $300bn empire spans Jaguar Land Rover and Air India as well as
11 hours ago
Iran's President Masoud Pezeshkian defended a memorandum of understanding with the United States as the best way out of a stalled war. Meanwhile, the new head of the Islamic Republic's top security body warned, in a more forceful tone, of retaliation if neighbouring countries support U.S
11 hours ago
Authorities in China have launched an investigation into reports of formaldehyde being used to preserve the freshness of cabbages for human consumption. Officials in the northeastern Hebei province confirmed that they had verified footage showing individuals dipping cabbages in a solution before
11 hours ago
Three newborns died after a fire that broke out in the neonatal intensive care unit of a government hospital in Maharashtra’s Amravati district in the early hours of Monday, PTI reported. The fire broke out at the Amravati District Women’s Hospital around 3
11 hours ago
Imran's party demands immediate cardiac care for him at Shifa International Hospital Imran's party demands immediate cardiac care for him at Shifa International Hospital Published on: Aug 24, 2026, 11:10:49 IST PTI Prefer HTon Google Share via Copy link Islamabad
11 hours ago
Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s three-day visit to New Delhi in July 2026 for the India-Japan summit appears to have elevated relations between the two Asian countries into a fresh phase of strategic expansion. Ties had already undergone a remarkable transformation over the past decade
11 hours ago
How well do COVID antivirals actually work? Not as well as we thought How well do COVID antivirals actually work? Not as well as we thought Published on: Aug 24, 2026, 11:11:50 IST PTI Prefer HTon Google Share via Copy link Sydeny, If you're aged over 70
11 hours ago
On Sunday, in a post on X, Wali said the audio contained "explosive evidence" and claimed that Brar admitted his gang had ordered Nijjar's killing, alleging that the assassination was driven by an inter-gang feud. Ottawa: Three years after NIA designated terrorist Hardeep Singh Nijjar was killed in
14 hours ago
Until recently, there would have been little to distinguish Vietnam's so-called Justice Tree from the hundreds of others lining the streets of Hanoi. Then the bouquets started piling up. It was here that former politician Nguyen Sy Cuong was driving his BMW in May last year when he veered into the
14 hours ago
Fast-fashion giant Shein says it plans to raise up to HK13.86bn (£1.3bn; $1.77bn) when its shares start trading on the Hong Kong stock market on 1 September. In a filing on Monday, Shein said it will offer nearly 280 million shares for between HK$47.60 and HK$49.50
14 hours ago
A fast-moving, wind-driven wildfire near Reno, Nevada, has forced about 42,000 people to evacuate, while another 45,000 have been urged to prepare to leave. The Hawk Fire has burned 15,040 acres, destroyed some homes and injured six people. Officials declared a state of emergency as the blaze
14 hours ago
Former Indian diplomat Navdeep Suri has raised concerns about the verification process under the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls. Suri, a retired Indian Foreign Services officer, went through the process in Punjab. It is among the 16 states where the voter roll revision is being
14 hours ago
A moderate earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 5.9 rattled eastern Japan, including the Tokyo area, early Sunday (August 23, 2026), injuring more than 20 people, most of them slightly, officials said. There was no danger of a tsunami. According to the Japan Meteorological Agency
1 days ago
Chinese humanoid robots broke records set by humans, including beating Usain Bolt’s 100-meter sprint world record, on the opening day of the Olympics-like World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing on Saturday (August 22, 2026). More than 2,000 humanoid robots were participating in the event
1 days ago
One afternoon in 1907, a young accountant named Chandrasekhar Venkata Raman walked into the laboratory of the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science at 210 Bowbazar Street in Calcutta. Though he had a passion for the sciences, colonial India offered no stable careers in the field
1 days ago
Three first information reports were filed against 14 identified and more than 200 unidentified persons on Saturday in connection with clashes between the police and student protesters a day earlier, PTI quoted Ranchi Superintendent of Police Paras Rana as saying
1 days ago
Did an Amazon delivery guy assault a 71-year-old man in California? What we know about the attack and lawsuit A California lawsuit alleged that an Amazon delivery driver assaulted a 71-year-old man at an Elk Grove gas station. Updated on: Aug 23, 2026
1 days ago
‘Pure evil’: Videos of mothers splashing water at their kids spark outrage amid Lindsay Clancy trial Social media videos of mothers throwing water at their children have sparked concerns amid Lindsay Clancy's trial. Published on: Aug 23, 2026
1 days ago
The sister of jailed former Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan on Saturday (August 22, 2026) filed a petition in the Supreme Court, accusing the government and senior officials of violating the top court’s order to shift him to a private hospital for medical examination and treatment
1 days ago
The United States and Canada have entered into uncharted territory. The longtime allies and economic partners, who have enjoyed free trade for decades, are now in an escalating trade war with no clear off ramp. And for Prime Minister Mark Carney
1 days ago
Harrisburg weather update: Special Weather Statement issued for central Pennsylvania as thunderstorms bring 40mph wind NWS has issued a Special Weather Statement for Harrisburg and surrounding parts of central Pennsylvania. Published on: Aug 23, 2026
1 days ago
The police in Maharashtra’s Latur have registered a first information report against Abhijeet Dipke, the founder of the Cockroach Janta Party political campaign, for allegedly entering a government school without permission, threatening teachers and defaming the institution
1 days ago
The United States and Iran exchanged defiant messages ahead of Monday’s (August 24, 2026) scheduled announcement of new U.S. economic sanctions that could impact the Islamic Republic and Tehran’s most important trading partners including China
1 days ago
Fourteen people were killed in military air strikes at a monastery in Myanmar early on Friday, opposition fighters and a local rescue worker have said. All of those killed were elderly and a number of monks were also injured, the rescue worker told BBC Burmese, adding that the site was struck twice
1 days ago
Deadly airstrikes in Gaza killed at least ten people on Wednesday. These attacks occurred just days after U.S. negotiators asked Israel to reduce its actions. Israeli troops also crossed the Gaza ceasefire line and detained a Hamas official. The ongoing conflict has killed over seventy-three
1 days ago
The Armed Forces Tribunal on Thursday upheld an administrative censure for a brigadier who was commanding a sector of the Rashtriya Rifles in Jammu and Kashmir’s Poonch district in December 2023 when three civilians died during an interrogation following a militant attack
1 days ago
