source : the age
Hello and welcome back to our live coverage of national news this Wednesday, October 14. Here’s what is making news today.
- Prime Minister Anthony Albanese wants to block the planned livestream of a US execution by firing squad after US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth promised the public would be able to watch it. The PM said yesterday he would do whatever he could to stop the stream from being available to watch in Australia, and called it “completely abhorrent”.
- Treasurer Jim Chalmers confronted One Nation’s rise during a speech to the Australia Institute last night in which he said voters were turning to the minor party as a response to genuine economic hardship. He urged the government not to take a passive approach to the far right, and said leaders had a responsibility offer solutions to the real challenges faced by Australians.
- Cornell University is suspending parties and other social events at fraternity houses for the rest of the academic year as it faces mounting outrage over its handling of allegations that a female student was sexually assaulted at a fraternity house.
- And climate campaigner Greta Thunberg has joined thousands of French school students at a rally in Paris to back their calls for more education funding.
Britain’s spy chief has concluded that Russian agencies acted “pretty strongly” to try to influence the UK referendum on the European Union a decade ago, but he warned against concluding that this meant they had a big impact on the outcome.
MI5 director-general Ken McCallum revealed his view after delivering an annual speech on the threats facing the nation, one day after Prime Minister Andy Burnham sparked intense debate by revealing that security agencies told him of the Russian interference in the Brexit vote.
“It is openly on the record that Russia Today and Sputnik and other Russian media organisations came in pretty strongly around the referendum,” said McCallum, who has led MI5 since 2020 and has been at the agency for about 25 years. “And it is also a matter of open-source record that there was a certain amount of interference attempted through trolls and bots and so forth.”
McCallum said this did not mean the interference was successful in swaying the result of the referendum, in which 52 per cent of voters chose to leave the EU. In remarks reported by the BBC, he said there was “comparative unimpressiveness” among Russian “trolls” on social media despite the attention they gained.
Burnham triggered criticism from Brexit advocates on Monday after the release of a podcast interview in which he said security agencies gave him a “clear answer” that Russia had interfered in the 2016 referendum. Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, a major advocate for Brexit, said this was a lie and there was no interference. Former prime minister Boris Johnson, another Brexit advocate, said there was no successful interference.
Amid the furious argument, Burnham’s office said the prime minister did not say the interference was effective and was not arguing the referendum outcome was not legitimate.
Pope Leo’s surgery on Tuesday (Rome time) to remove a small growth on one of his lungs went successfully and as planned, the Vatican said, about seven hours after the pontiff was hospitalised for the first major health issue of his 17-month tenure.
Leo, 71, was treated at Rome’s Gemelli hospital for the removal of the small nodule, which the pontiff said on Sunday had been spotted early during a recent check-up.
“The procedure was completed successfully, within the expected timeframe and as planned,” said a brief Vatican statement issued late on Tuesday (Wednesday AEDT) that did not offer further details.
The Vatican said earlier that the procedure was led by the Gemelli’s chief thoracic surgeon, Professor Stefano Margaritora.
Hello and welcome back to our live coverage of national news this Wednesday, October 14. Here’s what is making news today.
- Prime Minister Anthony Albanese wants to block the planned livestream of a US execution by firing squad after US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth promised the public would be able to watch it. The PM said yesterday he would do whatever he could to stop the stream from being available to watch in Australia, and called it “completely abhorrent”.
- Treasurer Jim Chalmers confronted One Nation’s rise during a speech to the Australia Institute last night in which he said voters were turning to the minor party as a response to genuine economic hardship. He urged the government not to take a passive approach to the far right, and said leaders had a responsibility offer solutions to the real challenges faced by Australians.
- Cornell University is suspending parties and other social events at fraternity houses for the rest of the academic year as it faces mounting outrage over its handling of allegations that a female student was sexually assaulted at a fraternity house.
- And climate campaigner Greta Thunberg has joined thousands of French school students at a rally in Paris to back their calls for more education funding.
