John Leake's August 29, 2026 essay on The Focal Points treats the war in Ukraine not as a distant European tragedy but as an American-run proxy campaign that has already failed on its own terms and is now climbing a more dangerous ladder. The piece is partisan and apocalyptic in tone, yet the structure of its argument is clear: NATO's 2008 promise ...

"The sister of a young British mother butchered by a small-boat arrival has torn into the Labour government for going to court to keep the public from seeing who is committing what crime in this country. Alex Whyte told GB News she feels "sick, disgusted and completely let down." Anger, she said, "doesn't even cover what I feel, and it never will."...

A disturbing question is emerging from Britain's prisons. Reports suggest that some non-Muslim prisoners are being pressured into converting to Islam, not necessarily because they have undergone a spiritual revelation, but because religious identity has become entangled with protection, power and gang organisation inside parts of the prison system....

Kevin Finn's field guide (link below), sorts modern Leftists into four types that "often overlap": the blind, who will not look; the evil, who look and still choose harm; the crazy, who believe what cannot be true; and the stupid, who cannot follow a cause to its effect. The concession of overlap is the most honest sentence in the piece. It is also...

Theodore Dalrymple's piece in The American Conservative begins with a classroom joke that is no longer allowed to be a joke. Sixty years ago an English teacher said his job was to teach discrimination: between the good and the bad, the beautiful and the meretricious. That older meaning has been driven out of polite institutions almost as thoroughly...

The most disturbing thing about the latest American pressure on Britain over the Falkland Islands is not that Donald Trump is about to hand them to Argentina. He cannot. The Falklands are under British administration, their inhabitants overwhelmingly wish to remain British, and no American president possesses a magic pen capable of transferring sov...

Australia's medicines regulator is considering Moderna's mFLUSIVA, a new mRNA vaccine for seasonal influenza. Its pivotal trial contained no inert placebo, severe reactions preventing normal daily activity were far more common than with the conventional shot, and America's regulator has demanded continuing surveillance of deaths and serious neurolo...

Professor David Flint has put his finger on one of the more cynical features of Australian politics after the Bondi Beach massacre. Faced with an antisemitic terrorist atrocity, the Albanese government rapidly discovered that one of the people requiring political attention was the Australian licensed gun owner. It was an extraordinary displacement ...

The Daily Mail story is an American nightmare with Australian bones. Jon Wellinghoff, who once ran the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, walked the country through a simple piece of arithmetic after gunmen shot up a San Jose substation. Model the three big American grids: East, West, Texas, and take out nine of the right substations, three clus...

A right to self-defence that exists only on a statute book is a consolation prize for the people who can already run, punch, and wait. The aged cannot run. A lot of women cannot win a fight against a grown man who has decided the fight is happening. The disabled do not get a special exemption from gravity. "Call the police" is not a strategy when t...

There is an old Australian expression for something so obvious that even Blind Freddy could see it. The expression seems particularly appropriate to the global oil market in 2026, except that Blind Freddy apparently never secured a position in an energy ministry, Treasury department or Western cabinet. The warning lights are flashing everywhere. Th...

Meta will pay the US states up to about $17 billion and wrap Facebook and Instagram in a new set of child-safety clothes. Attorneys general called it transformative. The company denied wrongdoing and wrote a cheque large enough to end a trial before Mark Zuckerberg had to sit in the box. Both things can be true. The money is real. Whether the safet...

Bill Gates does not do mysticism. When he says the industry is lying to the public about artificial intelligence, it is not a poet talking. It is a man who spent his life turning software into a civilisation, watching the next stack outrun the last one, and admitting, late, and in public, that the people selling it know more than they will say. In ...

For decades intelligent design has been treated less as an argument to be answered than as an embarrassment to be removed from polite intellectual company. Mention design in biology and the ritual responses arrive almost automatically: Darwin, evolution, creationism, God of the gaps, case closed. The confidence of the dismissal is remarkable becaus...

Humanity has been waiting for the end of the world for a remarkably long time. The date changes. The mechanism changes. The prophet changes. The world stubbornly remains. Comets have been coming to get us. Planets have been about to collide with us. Nuclear war has repeatedly been days away. Computers were going to stop civilisation at midnight on ...

Something rather extraordinary has happened in Australian politics. Immigration reduction, until recently treated across much of the political establishment as somewhere between economically illiterate and morally suspect, has suddenly become respectable. What caused this intellectual revelation was not a newly discovered economic paper, Treasury a...

Hopelessness in modern Britain is not a mood. It is an audit. People are not depressed because they read too much news. They are depressed because the old bargain is dead and everyone can still recite the script. Work. Save. Obey. Pay in. The state will keep the streets usable, the hospital reachable, the pension yours, and the future open to your ...

Donald Trump told Glenn Beck he would "absolutely prohibit the Sharia law thing." One country. One system. Where it appears, "take it out." He pointed at London and Paris and called what he saw there "almost like a second way of life." That sentence is not exotic. The American settlement is already supposed to be this: no religious code becomes the...

The original question was never really about bears. "Would you rather be alone in a forest with a man or a bear?" was a rhetorical device dressed up as a thought experiment. Its purpose was not to calculate comparative risk but to announce a conclusion: men are so dangerous that an unpredictable wild predator is preferable to an unknown male human ...

The headline is doing what headlines are for. Labor, we are told, is about to unveil an immigration "crackdown," aimed at international students, visitor visas, and the onshore applications that turn a temporary stay into a long argument with the department. The Australian puts the motive in the open: the package is being finished amid pressure fro...