By Jasjit Singh, Professor of Religion and Global Engagement, University of Leeds
The murder of 18-year-old Henry Nowak by Vickrum Digwa in Southampton in December 2025 is a profound tragedy that has left a family grieving and deeply affected the wider community. Any discussion that follows must keep that loss clearly in view.
Following Digwa’s conviction and sentencing, Nowak’s father said the family did not want his death “to be used to create further division, hatred or tension. We want his story to help make our streets
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By Nial Wheate, Professor, School of Natural Sciences, Macquarie University
The drug goserelin – commonly known as Zoladex – has been a quietly crucial medicine in Australia for decades.
This prescription medicine is used to suppress sex hormones, and is a key medication for the treatment of prostate cancer, endometriosis and some breast cancers.
However, the international pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca has…
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By Alex Thurston, Lecturer in Sport Management, Loughborough University
Mathew Dowling, Senior Lecturer in Sport Management, Loughborough University
After the headlines and the hype, only one world record was broken in Las Vegas, though many athletes set personal bests.
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By Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra
When One Nation leader Pauline Hanson addresses the National Press Club on June 17, there will be landmines everywhere.
It’s her first formal speech to the club in her 30-year (on and off) parliamentary career. How times have changed. When she spoke at a One Nation meeting there in July 1997, a contemporary report said the gathering was held at the club “after being refused permission to use other venues. The Press Club decided to host the meeting on the basis that it is a forum…
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By Gabrielle Appleby, Professor of Law, UNSW Law School, UNSW Sydney
Joo-Cheong Tham, Professor, Melbourne Law School, The University of Melbourne
After the High Court struck down the state government’s previous attempt, Victoria had no donations laws at all. Here’s what the proposed new ones say.
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By Erica Millar, Senior Research Fellow, Social Inquiry, La Trobe University
Anna Noonan, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Faculty of Health, University of Technology Sydney
New South Wales parliament is debating a bill this week that seeks to ban abortions performed on the basis of fetal sex.
If passed, health practitioners who perform such abortions would face professional misconduct charges and lose indemnity insurance coverage for the procedure.
At first glance, this might appear to be a defensible measure to address a practice that sits uneasily with gender equality.
But there’s little evidence sex-selective abortions are occurring…
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By Javier Martín Vide, Catedrático de Geografía Física, Universitat de Barcelona
El Niño is a recurring climate event with impacts across the globe. It has three phases: one cold (known as La Niña), one neutral, and one warm (El Niño).
In 2026, spring in the northern hemisphere took place in a neutral phase, which followed a relatively mild La Niña. Short-term forecast models indicate that by mid-year it is very likely that we will enter an El Niño phase. This El Niño could become very intense towards the end of the year, with talk of a “super-El Niño”. But…
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By Robbie Moore, Senior Lecturer in English, University of Tasmania
Amanda Lohrey’s Capture plays out as a sequence of conversations in strange rooms.
The centre of the novel is the consulting room of psychiatrist James Mather, lately stripped of all its therapeutic paintings and suggestive curios to a state of clinical blankness. There is also the apartment where the psychiatrist and his former lover regard each other from “two enormous couches in the centre of the room”. And there are the rooms of a shiatsu…
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By Ari Mattes, Lecturer in Communications and Media, University of Notre Dame Australia
For a nation obsessed with professional sport, there is a surprising dearth of Aussie sports films. There have been, of course, a handful of memorable ones: The Club (1980), The Coolangatta Gold (1984) and, more recently, The Final Winter (2007).
But apart from the low-budget 2024 film Life After Fighting – understandable if you haven’t heard of it, it made less than A$6,000 at the box office – Beast is the first Australian film to be set in the world of mixed martial arts.
Patton…
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By Amanda Turnbull-McRae, Senior Lecturer in Law, University of Waikato
As AI models become cheaper and more attractive, they will likely encourage new uses and higher volumes of use – erasing any efficiency gains.
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