America and Israel, nuclear-armed states have attacked Iran.
Israel, which has never declared its nuclear stockpiles nor its borders, has spent 2.5 years committing genocide against Gaza, a trapped community with no significant defensive weapons.
Israel has bombed six countries which are not at war with it. America funded it and elected Donald Trump to lead the violence from the front.
America and Israel pontificate about other states’ fitness to hold nuclear weapons.
Nuclear-armed Russia has invaded and battered Ukraine for four long years. Nuclear-armed Pakistan has begun to bomb the cities of Afghanistan, a state which lacks even an air force with which to defend its people (not that the Taliban care for the lives of their people).
We awake in the world that wise, caring people worked to avert for over a century; a world of impunity and gleeful slaughter by the already-overarmed.
People tried to minimise the risk and the harm of war with a few basic agreements. They dared to intervene for the protection and survival of civilians, doctors, journalists. They wrote laws to criminalise aggression and genocide.
All this is going up in smoke, and not one of the aggressors/provocateurs/genocidaires has a viable claim of self-defence.
How many people wake up in terror this morning (if they slept at all last night) in this new world?
Marilyn Garson writes about Palestinian and Jewish dissent.
Speakers at a pro-Palestine rally in central Auckland Tamaki Makaurau today were highly critical of the erosion of New Zealand’s once proud nuclear-free and independent foreign policy.
They also warned against being tied into a United States that is pivoting a hostile policy towards China, New Zealand’s major trading partner.
Ironically, just hours after the rally ended news broke of the unprovoked and illegal attack by Israel and the US against Iran barely eight months after a 12-day war last year.
With a theme posing the question “Is New Zealand a peace loving nation or a cog in the US war machine,” the speakers concluded that indeed the Pacific country was a “US war machine cog”.
Physicist Dr Peter Wills, a long-time activist and advocate for peace and a nuclear-free Pacific, focused on New Zealand’s role in the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance.
He said the Five Eyes relationship has superseded ANZUS “or anything else”, saying while the pact formalised in 1946 used to be intelligence, now it was the name of a five-nation military grouping.
“That’s the Anglo-Saxon countries,” he said. “Us good English-speaking people, you know, the white imperialists and colonialists of the world – the UK, USA, Canada, Australia and little old New Zealand.
“We’re all a part of it.
Eavesdropping on countries “It used to be an intelligence agreement because they would talk about what they have listened to with other countries by eavesdropping on their radio communications and so on.
“But now everything has become so integrated, they have become the centre of war fighting.”
An Auckland protester with a “fake ceasefire” banner criticising the almost daily villations by Israel in Gaza. Image: Asia Pacific Report
Explaining further, Dr Wills said: “And so they have this thing that they call C-5, which is command control for communications, computers and cyber.”
He said a top priority project was to make up a globally integrated “all domain” command and control system, which was hoped to be in place for next year.
The project had been discussed in Portsmouth, UK, in May 2024. Its purpose was to track friendly and enemy forces and send orders for attack.
“All domains – navy, land, air and space forces,” said Dr Wills, an honorary professor.
Globally integrated intelligence and military actions could be launched and directed anywhere in the world.
Protesters at today’s pro-Palestine rally in Te Komititanga Square. Image: Asia Pacific Report
Countering China It was electronic infrastructure for a superpower confrontation – to “develop a credible and effective combined all-domain command and control capability for operations to counter China”.
For Five Eyes officers overseeing these new digital and AI war-fighting systems at the Portsmouth meeting, a key objective was building the capability for confrontation with China.
“This means NZ following the US into military conflict with China,” Dr Wills said.
“We are involved in GIDE – Global Information Dominance Experiments, a new one is prepared every three months.
“And we will align with whatever is chosen by Five Eyes, either British or American.”
From an American point of view, said Dr Wills, New Zealand was a US ally, eager to play a role, “however small we are, to supporting the US around the globe”.
They also wanted NZ to get rid of its anti-nuclear legislation and return to ANZUS. This was the view of senior military officers and senior foreign affairs and intelligence officials
US ‘instability and bullying’ However, the majority of New Zealanders saw the US as a “source of instability and bullying” of New Zealand over its nuclear stand.
Dr Wills said New Zealand was influenced by the Anglo-American alliance today on many fronts, such as:
NZ Navy ships transiting “provocatively” through the South China Sea;
Being pressured to double military spending,;
Being pressured to join the “anti-China” AUKUS alliance;
The recent opening of a US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) office in Wellington; and
New Zealand playing an increasing role in space warfare.
But Dr Wills warned people “don’t give up – they haven’t won, not even with their arguments”.
He also called on people to become better informed, such as reading Nicky Hager’s 2011 book Other People’s Wars.
Polynesian Panther Tigilau Ness and his mokopuna (saxophone) . . . their rendition of “We Are All Palestinians” was dedicated to activist and Kia Ora Gaza co-founder Roger Fowler who died last Saturday. Image: Asia Pacific Report
NZ’s nuclear-free stance Other speakers included nuclear-free New Zealand historian and activist Maire Leadbeater, who outlined the early trajectory of the country’s opposition to French nuclear tests in the Pacific by dispatching a frigate to Moruroa, and the campaign to declare New Zealand nuclear-free.
She said New Zealand had led the way in the 1970s and 1980s and could take a principled independent foreign policy stand again.
The rally also invoked the spirit of Kia Ora Gaza co-founder and campaigner Roger Fowler, who died last Saturday and who was farewelled at a “celebration of life” ceremony at Ngā Tapuwae Community Centre in Mangere East on Wednesday.
Veteran Polynesian Panther Tigilau Ness and his grandson on the saxophone played a rousing rendition of the popular song “We Are All Palestinians”, created by Fowler, and South African-born activist Achmat Esau read out his poem, “Roger, I Did Not Know” in tribute.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Arshin Adib-Moghaddam, Professor in Global Thought and Comparative Philosophies, Inaugural Co-Director of Centre for AI Futures, SOAS, University of London
The US president has repeatedly said that Iran can’t be allowed to develop a nuclear weapon. The United Nations nuclear watchdog has reported that, because Iran has denied access to key sites hit during last year’s conflict, it cannot verify whether Iran has suspended all uranium enrichment or determine the current size and composition of its enriched uranium stockpile. However, Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said after the latest round of talks that “good progress” was being made on a deal to limit Iran’s nuclear programme in return for sanctions relief.
Now, from everything that the US president is saying, the goalposts have shifted from a nuclear deal to an attempt to force regime change.
So bombs are falling on various cities in Iran, family members are hiding, tragedies will inevitably happen and the innocent will suffer. This is the endpoint of a longstanding campaign by the US and Israeli right-wing to reshape the Middle East and the wider Muslim world at the barrel of a gun. This is yet another intervention in a long history of disastrous foreign moves that have destabilised the country since Britain and the Soviet Union deposed Reza Shah Pahlavi in 1941 and the CIA and MI6 orchestrated a coup to depose Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, in 1953.
The consequences of this attack are likely to be dire for the region and the world. Already, Iran has retaliated by targeting US bases in Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain and the first reports of casualties are emerging. Iran is unlikely to hold back. It’s clear that the Islamic Republic is viewing this as an existential threat.
Tehran will call on its allies in the region, the Houthis in Yemen, the Popular Mobilisation Forces in Iraq and Hezbollah in Lebanon which – despite being weakened over two years of attacks by Israel aided and abetted by the United States – have the capacity to expand the conflict throughout the region.
Iran has already indicated in recent drills with the Russian Navy that it may be capable of closing off the Strait of Hormuz, through which around one-quarter of the world’s oil and one-third of its liquefied natural gas travel. As a consequence, oil prices will explode and the world economy will suffer.
Clash of civilisations
There is a cultural component to this war, too. Israel and the US are conducting this war during the month of Ramadan. Muslims all over the world are fasting. For billions of them, this is the month of spirituality, peace and solidarity. Images of Iranian Muslims being killed by Israeli and US bombs threaten to further a clash of civilisations narrative which pits the Judeo-Christian world against Islam.
Iran has threatened retaliation across the Middle East.EPA/Abedin Taherkenareh
Muslims in European capitals, together with anti-war activists, will see this war as a clear aggression on the part of the US and Israel. Global public opinion will not be easily swayed into the direction Trump and Netanyahu would like.
And it must be asked, what will the leaders in Moscow and Beijing be thinking as they watch this illegal war and what might this mean for Ukraine and Taiwan? Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping are close to the government of Iran and will condemn this war. At the same time, they must feel emboldened to pursue their own agendas with military might.
So Trump and Netanyahu’s attack on Iran has the potential to plunge the world into deep crisis. Expect more refugees, more economic turmoil, more trauma, death and destruction. The only hope now is that cooler heads among world leaders can prevail to contain this conflict and to limit the actions of Trump and Netanyahu.
Diplomacy has to be prioritised. Attempting to force regime change by launching an illegal war is foolhardy. If Iran is further destabilised, the entire Middle East and beyond will be plunged into utter turmoil. From there the outcome for the whole world is dangerously uncertain.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Bamo Nouri, Honorary Research Fellow, Department of International Politics, City St George’s, University of London
US and Iranian negotiators met in Geneva earlier this week in what mediators described as the most serious and constructive talks in years. Oman’s foreign minister, Badr Albusaidi, spoke publicly of “unprecedented openness,” signalling that both sides were exploring creative formulations rather than repeating entrenched positions. Discussions showed flexibility on nuclear limits and sanctions relief, and mediators indicated that a principles agreement could have been reached within days, with detailed verification mechanisms to follow within months.
These were not hollow gestures. Real diplomatic capital was being spent. Iranian officials floated proposals designed to meet US political realities – including potential access to energy sectors and economic cooperation. These were gestures calibrated to allow Donald Trump to present any deal as tougher and more advantageous than the 2015 agreement he withdrew the US from in May 2018. Tehran appeared to understand the optics Washington required, even if contentious issues such as ballistic missiles and regional proxy networks remained outside the immediate framework. Then, in the middle of these talks, the bridge was shattered.
Sensing how close the negotiations were — and how imminent military escalation had become — Oman’s foreign minister, Badr Albusaidi, made an emergency dash to Washington in a last-ditch effort to preserve the diplomatic track.
In an unusually public move for a mediator, he appeared on CBS to outline just how far the talks had progressed. He described a deal that would eliminate Iranian stockpiles of highly enriched uranium, down-blend existing material inside Iran, and allow full verification by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) — with the possibility of US inspectors participating alongside them. Iran, he suggested, would enrich only for civilian purposes. A principles agreement, he indicated, could be signed within days. It was a remarkable disclosure — effectively revealing the contours of a near-breakthrough in an attempt to prevent imminent war.
But rather than allowing diplomacy to conclude, the US and Israel have launched coordinated strikes across Iran. Explosions were reported in Tehran and other cities. Trump announced “major combat operations,”, framing them as necessary to eliminate nuclear and missile threats while urging Iranians to seize the moment and overthrow their leadership. Iran responded with missile and drone attacks targeting US bases and allied states across the region.
What is most striking is not merely that diplomacy failed, but that it failed amid visible progress. Mediators were openly discussing a viable framework; both sides had demonstrated flexibility – a pathway to constrain nuclear escalation appeared tangible. Choosing military escalation at that moment undermines the premise that negotiation is a genuine alternative to war. It signals that even active diplomacy offers no guarantee of restraint. Peace was not naïve. It was plausible.
Iran’s approach in Geneva was strategic, not submissive. Proposals involving economic incentives – including energy cooperation – were not unilateral concessions but calculated compromises designed to structure a politically survivable agreement in Washington. The core objective was clear: constrain Iran’s nuclear programme through enforceable limits and intrusive verification, thereby addressing the very proliferation risks that sanctions and threats of force were meant to prevent.
Talks had moved beyond rhetorical posturing toward concrete proposals. For the first time in years, there was credible movement toward stabilising the nuclear issue. By attacking during that negotiation window, Washington and its allies have not only derailed a diplomatic opening but have cast doubt on the durability of American commitments to negotiated solutions. The message to Tehran – and to other adversaries weighing diplomacy – is stark: even when talks appear to work, they can be overtaken by force.
Iran is not Iraq or Libya
Advocates of escalation often invoke Iraq in 2003 or Libya in 2011 as precedents for rapid regime collapse under pressure. Those analogies are misleading. Iraq and Libya were highly personalised systems, overly dependent on narrow patronage networks and individual rulers. Remove the centre, and the structure imploded.
Iran is structurally different. It is not a dynastic dictatorship but an ideologically entrenched state with layered institutions, doctrinal legitimacy and a deeply embedded security apparatus, including the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Its authority is intertwined with religious, political and strategic narratives cultivated over decades. It has endured sanctions, regional isolation and sustained external pressure without fracturing.
Even a previous US-Israeli campaign in 2025 that lasted 12 days failed to eliminate Tehran’s retaliatory capacity. Far from collapsing, the state absorbed pressure and responded. Hitting such a system with maximum force does not guarantee implosion; it may instead consolidate internal cohesion and reinforce narratives of external aggression that the leadership has long leveraged.
Rhetoric surrounding the strikes has already shifted from tactical objectives to the language of regime change. US and Israeli leaders framed military action not solely as neutralising missile or nuclear capabilities, but as an opportunity for Iranians to overthrow their government. That calculus – regime change by force – is historically fraught with risk.
An incoming missile crashes into the sea off the port of Haifa in Israel as Iran retaliates.AP Photo/Leo Correa
The Iraq invasion should be a cautionary tale. The US spent more than a decade cultivating multiple Iraqi opposition groups – yet dismantling the centralised state apparatus still produced chaos, insurgency and fragmentation. The vacuum gave rise to extremist organisations such as IS, drawing the US into years of renewed conflict.
Approaching Iran with similar assumptions ignores both its institutional resilience and the complexity of regional geopolitics. Sectarian divisions, entrenched alliances and proxy networks mean that destabilisation in Tehran would not remain contained. It could rapidly spill across borders and harden into prolonged confrontation.
A region wired for escalation
Iran has invested heavily in asymmetric capabilities precisely to deter and complicate external intervention. Its missile, drone and naval systems are embedded along the Strait of Hormuz — a chokepoint for global energy — and linked into a network of regional allies and militias.
In the current escalation, Tehran has already launched retaliatory missile and drone strikes against US military bases and allied territories in the Gulf, hitting locations in Iraq, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates (including Abu Dhabi), Kuwait and Qatar in direct response to US and Israeli strikes on Iran’s cities, including Tehran, Qom and Isfahan. Explosions have been reported in Bahrain and the UAE, with at least one confirmed fatality in Abu Dhabi, and several bases housing US personnel have been struck or targeted, underscoring how the conflict has already spread beyond Iran’s borders
A full-scale regional war is now more likely than it was a week ago. Miscalculation could draw multiple states into conflict, inflame sectarian fault lines and disrupt global energy markets. What might have remained a contained nuclear dispute now risks expanding into a wider geopolitical confrontation.
What about Trump’s promise of no more forever wars?
Trump built his political brand opposing “endless wars” and criticising the Iraq invasion. “America First” promised strategic restraint, hard bargaining and an aversion to open-ended intervention. Escalating militarily at the very moment diplomacy was advancing sits uneasily with that doctrine and revives questions about the true objectives of US strategy in the Middle East.
Tehran and other Iranian cities have come under heavy bombardment from Israel and the US.AP Photo
If a workable nuclear framework was genuinely emerging, abandoning it in favour of escalation invites a deeper question: does sustained tension serve certain strategic preferences more comfortably than durable peace?
Trump’s Mar-a-Lago address announcing the strikes carried unmistakable echoes of George W. Bush before the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Military action was framed as reluctant yet necessary – a pre-emptive move to eliminate gathering threats and secure peace through strength. The rhetoric of patience exhausted and danger confronted before it fully materialises closely mirrors the language Bush used to justify the march into Baghdad.
The parallel extends beyond tone. Bush cast the Iraq war as liberation as well as disarmament, promising Iraqis freedom from dictatorship. Trump similarly urged Iranians to reclaim their country, implicitly linking force to regime change. In Iraq, that fusion of shock and salvation produced not swift democratic renewal but prolonged instability. The assumption that military force can reorder political systems from the outside has already been tested – and its costs remain visible.
The central challenge now facing the US is not simply Iran’s military capability. It is credibility. Abandoning negotiations mid-course signals that diplomacy can be overridden by force even when progress is visible. That perception will resonate far beyond Tehran.
Peace was never guaranteed. It was limited and imperfect, focused primarily on nuclear constraints rather than human rights or regional proxy networks. But it was plausible – and closer than many assumed. Breaking the bridge while building it does more than halt a single agreement – it risks convincing both sides that negotiation itself is futile.
In that world, trust erodes, deterrence hardens and aggression – not agreement – becomes the default language of international power. What we are witnessing is yet another clear indication that the rules-based order has been consigned to the history books.
A West Papuan leader has accused the Indonesian government of lying over its operations and “masking” the military role of some civilian aircraft.
Disputing an Indonesian government statement about reported that TPNPB fired upon an aircraft in Boven Digoel, killing both the pilot and copilot, United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) interim president Benny Wenda said the aircraft was “not civilian”.
Wenda added that the Indonesian government was “tricking the world” about its military operations in West Papua.
“The Cessna plane the TPNPB [West Papua National Liberation Army] fired upon in Boven Digoel was not a civilian plane, as the police spokesman misleadingly stated, but part of a security operation,” Wenda said in a statement.
“Indonesia is again disguising their military activity as [civilian] activity. They are also willfully breaching the no-fly zones established by the TPNPB.”
The occupied conflict areas in which the Indonesian military TNI were “not permitted to fly” had been “clearly marked out by the TPNPB”.
“This is the same pattern Indonesia used in 1977, when Indonesia used a disguised civilian plane to bomb villages across the highlands and massacre thousands, including many members of my own family,” Wenda said.
Clear strategy He added there was a clear strategy behind this — “Indonesia wants to avoid the attention that would be drawn by a large scale military buildup, so they mask their introduction of weapons and other military equipment and personnel”.
Wenda said they were effectively “using their own people as human shields”.
Indonesian soldiers and equipment next to a civilian aircraft. Image: ULMWP
Indonesian troops boarding a civilian aircraft in the West Papua Highlands. Image: ULMWP video screenshot APR
The TPNPB attacks took place on February 11, with the plane being downed and the pilot and co-pilot being killed.
A second attack took place in Mimika, near the Grasberg gold and copper mine, which has been the cause of so much West Papuan deaths over the past 40 years.
“Indonesia then immediately began operating their propaganda machine, claiming that the planes were simply engaged in civilian and medical supply distribution,” Wenda said.
“The truth is that these aircraft were involved in intelligence and security operations.
Media blackout “Indonesia is only able to spread these lies and mislead the international community because of their six-decades long media blackout in West Papua.
“No journalists or NGOs are allowed to operate in our land. West Papua is a closed society, just like North Korea. I thank God we have civilian journalists to document their lies.”
By breaching these rules the military were inviting further attacks, Wenda said.
“We must always remember that the Indonesian military uses any armed action by West Papuans for their own gain, as a pretext for more militarisation, more displacement, and more deforestation and ecocide.”
Wenda said their aim was always to escalate the situation as a way of ethnically cleansing Papuans, forcing them to become refugees in their own land, and strengthening their colonial hold over West Papua.
“It isn’t a coincidence that in the week since this incident we have seen an escalation in Yahukimo, an Indonesia-occupied community health centre, and transformed it into a military post, displacing and traumatising local residents.”
Using hospitals and other health infrastructure for military means was a clear breach of international humanitarian law, Wenda said.
Normal for military In West Papua such behaviour was normal for the military.
“In the same week in Puncak regency, Indonesian military personnel seized a school, preventing students from learning and putting ordinary people at risk of harm. Soldiers are posted in classrooms with guns.”
Wenda called on the Indonesian government to withdraw their troops from occupied West Papua, allow civilians to return home, cease using civilian vehicles as a cover for military action, and immediately facilitate a UN Human Rights visit to West Papua — as has been demanded by more than 110 UN Member states.
“Ultimately, Indonesia must come to the table to discuss a referendum,” Wenda said. “This is the only path to a peaceful solution in West Papua.”
An Indonesian Embassy spokesperson blamed the “armed criminal group”, an expression it uses to describe resistance movement fighters.
Having known the Filipino photojournalist Alex Baluyut, who died yesterday aged 69, for nearly half a century, I feel that looking at his photos — how he documented the events that unfurled during his lifetime — reveals his own lifelong search for himself.
By documenting the rawest parts of human existence, including war, poverty, and the shifting tides of our history, he was reconciling his own place within those same struggles.
Whether on the frontlines of conflict in Mindanao or the troubled streets of Metro Manila, he wasn’t just looking for a story; he was searching for a sense of truth.
I first knew Alex when he was a photographer for the Associated Press. In those days, film was expensive, but it was not a constraint for him.
Having the resources of a major agency gave him a distinct advantage over his colleagues. I noticed how he loved documenting every movement of a subject, while others were often content with a single “good shot” for the day’s coverage.
It surprised me when, after we were dismissed from the Times Journal for union work and were organising a new daily with the late Joe Burgos, Alex approached me and Chuchay Fernandez. He asked if he can join Pahayagang Malaya.
He didn’t focus on the economic difficulties of a struggling paper, but instead embraced the challenge of being part of the “Mosquito Press” during the darkest days of the Marcos martial law era, especially during the surge of outrage following the death of opposition leader Benigno Aquino.
The 2013 photography book Mysteries of Chance by Alex Baluyut and five other Filipino photographers. Image: Voices of Vision Publishing
Risky coverage Alex was not just focused on protest rallies, his main assignments then. Together, we planned risky coverage of the underground movement, which took us to dangerous locations, including Mindanao to cover the Moro secessionist rebellion.
During the 76-day war in Lanao del Sur, Alex was hesitant to leave even after we received reports of napalm bombing; he stayed until it became clear the site was impossible to reach.
On one occasion, we braved a torturous hike to reach a MILF (Moro Islamic Liberation Front) camp on the border of Lanao and Maguindanao to take the first-ever photos of their forces in formation at their own campsite.
Even then, I noticed a shift in Alex’s mood. His adrenaline was fueled by a drive to expose the plight of the aggrieved, a mission that eventually brought us to the countryside to cover the communist insurgency.
His photos were not always meant for the newspapers; they were documenting the struggle so that people might understand it. Eventually, the pressure of witnessing the stark truths of an armed struggle took its toll on him.
Interestingly, the photos Alex provided me from his documentation of the underground movement did not show the stark reality of a rebellion, but rather the communities where he was immersed.
He was the best man at my wedding, and my only lament was that he failed to document the ceremony. Instead, he handed me and Merci a photo of a smiling Mangyan — a rare subject given his usual themes.
He told me it was his way of wishing us a happy life.
Mobile kitchen project Alex also sought to chart a life beyond photojournalism. Driven by his love for cooking, he and some friends set up a small beer garden on the sidewalks of Ermita, which sparked his adventures in the restaurant business.
It was no surprise then that he eventually devoted his remaining years to serving the needy during calamities, co-founding the Art Relief Mobile Kitchen with his wife, Precious.
The news of Alex’s passing from cirrhosis of the liver stunned me, especially knowing the impact our late colleague Tony Nieva had on both of us. Tony also succumbed to the dreaded illness.He was our mentor in the struggle for press freedom and in documenting the lives of the downtrodden.
After Tony passed away, I rarely saw and worked with Alex, except for a few commissioned book projects.
Although I monitored his journey through social media and felt a sense of guilt for not joining his new advocacy, I am grateful to have been part of the life of a man who sought the truth in our ailing society and worked, in his own way, to lift the spirits of the marginalised.
US President Donald Trump had been talking about it.
‘Some US action expected’ “Most people expected some sort of United States action. So there is surprise that Israel has gone first.
“But there will be speculation here in the United States — inevitably — that this is [Israeli Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu once again trying to force the United States to take action against Iran.
“And the reason he has done this is to try and force their hand.”
In an eight-minute video message shared on Truth Social, he said: “Short time ago, US military began major combat operation in Iran. Our objective is to defend the American people by eliminating threats from the Iranian regime.”
Mehran Kamrava, director of the Iranian studies unit at the Arab Centre for Research and Policy Studies and professor at Georgetown University in Qatar, said Israel appeared to have “launched an attack designed to derail the [nuclear] negotiations” between the US and Iran. A new round of talks had been scheduled for next week.
ER Report: Here is a summary of significant articles published on EveningReport.nz on February 28, 2026.
Cuban ambassador denounces US aggression and violations of international law INTERVIEW: By Eugene Doyle This is a moment of great peril for the small Caribbean nation of Cuba. Nothing less than its sovereignty is on the line as the US drives its knee into the neck of 10 million Cubans by means of a crushing air and sea blockade and a set of secondary sanctions
Keith Rankin Analysis – New Zealand’s Fiscal Crisis Analysis by Keith Rankin, 27 February 2026. I heard this on RNZ News 11am 12 Feb 2026: “The government’s finances are in better shape than expected due to lower [government] spending and a higher tax take. Treasury figures … show a deficit of $5.2b for the six months ended December, almost $1.6b below the half-year
Keith Rankin Essay – Vagrants and a Very Basic Universal Income Essay by Keith Rankin, 25 February 2026. Over the last few days, there has been plenty of media chatter in relation to the government’s proposal to pass a law enabling police to forcibly shift street dwellers from Auckland’s CBD. (Refer ‘Move On’ orders penalise those with the least, Scoop 22 Feb 2026.) While Labour likes
Keith Rankin Essay – Milano-Cortina, Pandemic Central Essay by Keith Rankin, 20 February 2026. Imagine if the Olympic Games were currently being held in Wuhan, China. There would be widespread mentionings of it having been the starting place of the Covid19 pandemic, in December 2019. But pandemics (not ‘global pandemics’; pandemics are global by definition, as are world wars) have two places
Keith Rankin Analysis – Parliamentary Term Length; is New Zealand really an Outlier? Analysis by Keith Rankin, 19 February 2026 The RNZ news bulletin of 10pm on 18 February stated: “New Zealand and Australia are outliers in having three-year parliamentary terms, with four or five year terms far more common … politicians have over the years expressed frustration at how much can be achieved in a three-year cycle.”
Local plumber Hannah Spencer beats both Reform and Labour to win UK byelection Novara Media In a spectacular triumph, Britain’s Green Party has won the Gorton and Denton byelection in Greater Manchester. Local plumber Hannah Spencer has now become the party’s fifth MP — a historic victory for the ascendent Greens, who ran a campaign of national hope and international solidarity against Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The byelection
Amnesty slams global impunity fueling Israel’s illegal West Bank annexation measures Amnesty International Amnesty International has condemned Israeli authorities over unleashing a series of unlawful measures deliberately designed to dispossess Palestinians in the occupied West Bank — including East Jerusalem — and to make the annexation of the territory an irreversible reality. These decisions since December 2025 represent an unprecedented escalation – in scale and speed
Woolworths’ AI agent rambled about its ‘mother’. It’s a sign of deeper problems with the tech rollout Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Uri Gal, Professor in Business Information Systems, University of Sydney Recently some Australian shoppers got more than they bargained for when they chatted with Woolworths’ artificial intelligence (AI) assistant, Olive. Instead of sticking to groceries, recipes and basket suggestions, Olive reportedly produced strange, overly human-like responses. It
Why Commonwealth Bank’s $1 billion suspected loan fraud should change how we bank and do business Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Toby Walsh, Professor of AI, Research Group Leader, UNSW Sydney The Commonwealth Bank reportedly suspects around A$1 billion in home loans were obtained fraudulently, including through AI-generated documents. The Australian Financial Review says the bank has reported itself to police and the corporate watchdog to investigate. According
What is Aspergillus, the fungus behind recent hospital deaths? Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Thomas Jeffries, Senior Lecturer in Microbiology, Western Sydney University A common mould has killed two people, and left four others seriously ill, at one of Sydney’s largest hospitals. Health authorities are investigating a cluster of fungal infections at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital’s transplant unit. Six patients
Home ground disadvantage? How sleep and travel could impact the Matildas Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michele Lastella, Senior Lecturer, CQUniversity Australia On paper, the Matildas should have a major advantage playing on home soil for the upcoming Women’s Asian Cup. However, from a sleep and travel perspective, they may be fighting a hidden disadvantage despite Australia hosting the tournament, which runs from
View from The Hill: Ley formally resigns, tells Taylor it’s ‘vital’ he holds Farrer Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra Deposed Liberal leader Sussan Ley formally resigned from parliament on Friday – and sent a blunt challenge to her successor, Angus Taylor, in her farewell statement. Speaker Milton Dick will now set the date for the byelection in the regional
NSW’s new rapid response police unit may help some people feel safer, but it also raises difficult questions Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrew Poe, Associate Professor of Social and Political Thought, Australian Catholic University The New South Wales government has just announced the launch of a new, permanent rapid response police unit. Composed of about 250 officers and 28 administrative staff, the unit will be equipped with a fleet
Ed Sheeran caught the train to Melbourne to protect the climate. But what about his thousands of fans? Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Milad Haghani, Associate Professor and Principal Fellow in Urban Risk and Resilience, The University of Melbourne This week, images on social media showed global superstar Ed Sheeran alighting from the overnight train from Sydney into the decidedly utilitarian surrounds of Southern Cross Station in Melbourne. In Australia
This is a moment of great peril for the small Caribbean nation of Cuba. Nothing less than its sovereignty is on the line as the US drives its knee into the neck of 10 million Cubans by means of a crushing air and sea blockade and a set of secondary sanctions designed to muscle the nations of the world into compliance to the hegemon.
The issues are not particular to Cuba; we are in the midst of a militant US that is determined to assert domination through force.
It was therefore a pleasure to spend time this week with Luis Ernesto Morejón Rodríguez, Cuba’s Ambassador to New Zealand in Wellington.
EUGENE DOYLE: Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech in Davos received considerable attention. He said: “Middle powers must act together because if we are not at the table, we are on the menu.” Cuba has been on the US menu for decades. What would be your message to those who support Carney’s call to “come together to create a third way with impact”?
AMBASSADOR RODRIGUEZ: Cuba believes a genuine “third way” can only exist if it defends the economic sovereignty of states against coercion. For more than 60 years, our country has been subjected to a policy explicitly designed to generate material hardship in order to force political change.
The issue therefore is not ideological but systemic: no nation can claim strategic autonomy while tolerating that another punishes third countries for lawful trade. True multilateralism begins when middle-sized nations act collectively to prevent the global economy from becoming an instrument of political pressure.
How does Cuba intend to use the United Nations General Assembly — where it enjoys near-unanimous support — to challenge the legality of “secondary sanctions” that weaponise the global financial system against trade with third parties?
Cuba will continue using the General Assembly to document and expose the extraterritorial nature of these measures. Each year the discussion goes beyond a vote: evidence is presented of banks cancelling humanitarian transfers, shipping companies refusing to transport fuel, and medical suppliers withdrawing contracts due to fear of penalties.
The objective is to consolidate an international legal and political consensus that no domestic legislation should be globally imposed or obstruct legitimate trade among sovereign states. The process is cumulative — it builds legitimacy and normative pressure over time.
In what other ways will Cuba navigate this latest campaign of maximum pressure by the United States? What support will it seek?
Historically Cuba responds through a combination of internal resilience and external cooperation: diversifying energy and trade partners, strengthening South-South relations, and promoting alternative financial arrangements. At the same time, priority is given to protecting essential social sectors.
Cuba does not seek geopolitical confrontation but economic normality — the ability to purchase food, fuel, spare parts or medicines without third parties being penalized. The support we request is straightforward: respect for our right to trade.
Many people do not follow international news closely. Could you describe life in Cuba today and how the population and government are responding to what must be a severe economic crisis and the threat of US pressure?
Daily life is marked by material scarcity linked to severe financial and energy restrictions. Limited access to fuel can lead to extended power outages; families organise cooking around electricity availability and neighbours share refrigeration space to prevent food spoilage. Hospitals maintain essential services using constrained backup power systems.
Despite this, the state preserves universal health and education, and communities rely heavily on solidarity networks. It is less a conventional economic cycle than a society operating under continuous external pressure.
For an audience in Wellington that might interpret this as a “political dispute”, what does “maximum pressure” mean for a Cuban mother trying to feed her children, or for a doctor performing surgery during a 20-hour blackout?
Maximum pressure is experienced through ordinary situations: planning daily meals around electricity schedules, transporting patients when fuel for ambulances is scarce, or sterilising medical instruments under limited power conditions.
These are not political slogans but cumulative consequences of restrictions that prevent the country from freely purchasing fuel, spare parts or financing. Administrative decisions taken abroad translate into domestic difficulties at home.
In the West we often speak about international law but do not always apply it to ourselves. What is your message to those who want to live in a world governed by law rather than force?
Cuba asks for legal consistency: if international trade is rule-based, no country should be penalised for lawful commerce. We also recognise and appreciate New Zealand’s consistent favourable vote in the United Nations General Assembly in support of the resolution entitled “Necessity of ending the economic, commercial and financial embargo imposed by the United States of America against Cuba.”
That position reflects a principled commitment to multilateralism. In this context, we have encouraged New Zealand to continue upholding its traditional opposition to unilateral coercive measures and to the extraterritorial application of national laws. Silence regarding such sanctions weakens the very legal principles that protect all small states alike. The issue extends beyond bilateral relations — it concerns the integrity of international law itself.
What is your life like as a diplomat in New Zealand? How is your contact with government officials and the diplomatic community?
Diplomatic work in New Zealand takes place in a serious institutional environment where dialogue exists even amid disagreement. Our exchanges with officials are respectful and professional; positions may differ, but there is willingness to listen and understand context.
Much of our work here is explanatory rather than confrontational: clarifying that the Cuban situation is not merely a bilateral dispute but part of a broader debate about how the international order functions. The diplomatic community in Wellington is active and collegial, allowing frank discussions on global issues such as climate change, development and multilateralism.
The US objective is explicitly described as regime change through economic collapse. If Cuba yielded to these demands, what would the Global South lose?
A crucial precedent would be lost: that a nation can choose its political system without external tutelage. If prolonged economic strangulation succeeded in imposing internal change, it would legitimise a model of intervention applicable to any developing country.
It would no longer be necessary to negotiate with societies — sustained financial pressure would suffice. The Global South would see its effective autonomy reduced.
What is your vision for Cuba? Where would you like it to be in 10 or 20 years?
The aspiration is a fully normalised Cuba within the global economy — able to access financing, trade, and technology without restrictions — while preserving universal social policies in health, education, and equity. Change will continue, but it should occur by national decision, not external pressure.
In 20 years we hope Cuba will be known less for conflict with a major power and more for contributions in medical cooperation, biotechnology innovation, cultural exchange, and regional development. The ultimate goal is not perpetual resistance, but the freedom to choose its own path.
Eugene Doyle is a community organiser and independent writer based in Wellington, publisher of Solidarity and contributor to Asia Pacific Report. His first demonstration was at the age of 12 against the Vietnam war. This article was first published by Solidarity on 26 February 2024.
Imagine if the Olympic Games were currently being held in Wuhan, China. There would be widespread mentionings of it having been the starting place of the Covid19 pandemic, in December 2019.
Keith Rankin, trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.
But pandemics (not ‘global pandemics’; pandemics are global by definition, as are world wars) have two places of origin, though those two places could be the one-and-the-same. For Covid19, Wuhan was certainly the first place; the root source, to use a tree analogy. The second source is the base of the stem, the place from where a pandemic fans out and becomes almost unstoppable.
In the case of Covid19, the events in February 2020 in Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo – the jewel of the Italian Alps – were the origins of the pandemic. Without their role, Covid19 might have been a contained epidemic such as SARS (2003).
Since the near-run-disaster that was the SARS-Cov1 panic in 2003, the amount of useful epidemiological work on coronaviruses has been minimal. There was clearly research work being done, including in Wuhan. But that was mainly on the zoonotic origins of coronaviruses, and not on the administration of outbreaks. SARS-Cov1 was a severe novel coronavirus. Novel respiratory viruses – such as the 1918 influenza pandemic – are lethal, spread fast, and are hard to contain. More lethal than Sars-Cov1 was MERS which emerged around 2012. Yet preparations for a respiratory-illness pandemic were focussed almost entirely on a new strain of influenza. No prep for a new novel coronavirus. SARS-Cov2 was ‘tricky’, in that – less lethal but more transmissible than SARS-Cov1 – it fell on the cusp between being dangerously lethal and dangerously transmissible.
Geographic Analysis
The pandemic events of 2020 were not – at least not in any popular awareness – subjected to a proper geographical analysis. Most of the initial outbreaks of the SARS-Cov2 virus which escaped China were largely contained. There were relatively small outbreaks in Japan, Hong Kong, Australia and Seattle in the United States’ northwest; in some cases transmitted by passengers from a few cruise ships. And larger but still largely contained outbreaks in South Korea and in Iran. These outbreaks came directly from China. The containment of the Iran outbreak was facilitated by the West’s generally hostile attitude towards that country as a geopolitical ‘bad guy’; Iran was easier than most countries for the West to quarantine.
More problematic were the outbreaks in Spain and Italy, which can also be traced back to January 2020. In Spain the initial outbreak, direct from China, was more in the south; most likely linked to escapees from China. There was relatively little subsequent movement across the land border into France, though Andorra experienced a separate outbreak. The main risk from the south of Spain was the United Kingdom, given that, for many British people, southern Spain is either their first or second home. It would have been relatively easy to quarantine British arrivals from Spain; the British authorities ‘dropped a ball’ by being tardy here.
The main blind spot was that Spain is a western country, and westerners had become ingrained in the supposition that pandemics (and all things bad) come from other countries; or, more accurately phrased, ‘countries of others’. Guard rails that were up for China or Iran or even Japan and South Korea, were not there for ‘threats’ from West European countries.
The notion came about that the pandemic radiated out of southern China, rather than having flowed out of all of the places which had experienced outbreaks. When eyes should have been watching Spain and Italy, they were still firmly focused on China, and in a finger-pointing way.
The West could have learned much from China’s data about the impact of the new virus in terms of the demographics of victims and non-victims, and the extent and duration of their exposures and their symptoms. However, the western countries were more predisposed to put up the shutters with respect to that amazing country.
A large part of the problem in the 1918 influenza pandemic was the high numbers of younger adults who caught it and died from it. Covid19 was never like that. Data from China showed that few younger people had died from Covid19; unless, that is, they had had sustained exposures. For younger people, and for society as a whole, it was better for otherwise healthy non-allergic people to have early and tentative exposures to Covid than to be on tenterhooks awaiting what became the inevitable, and would become worse the longer the wait.
Milano-Cortina
More problematic than Spain was the coronavirus outbreak around and to the east of Milan – the ‘tech’ centre of Italy, and the fashion centre – and the connection of Milan to the ski resorts during the peak of the ski season; indeed during the February school holidays in Europe. Milan is the most monied city in Italy. It is an important entry-point for affluent techies on business, and for sundry one-percenters. Once the epidemic began in Wuhan, many of the monied of and around Wuhan (many were foreign nationals) had the nous to ‘escape’ – including to Macao and Hong Kong – before the Chinese central government closed the ‘stable doors’.
Milan and environs became a hotspot for witting and unwitting coronavirus refugees – affluent exiteers – just at the time Europe’s ten-percenters were heading to and from the ski resorts.
Further, there was the World Economic Forum, at Davos, Switzerland; a one-percenter retreat. A few of the delegates may have, unknowingly, arrived with Covid. Following the Forum, many delegates – coming straight from a transmissible environment – will have visited the other hotspots for the rich and famous; the other alpine resorts, and the principalities Monaco, Liechtenstein, Andorra. And San Marino, which is a centre for the world’s semi-licit arms trade. All of these places had significant outbreaks of Covid19 during February and March 2020. These were perfect environments for the rapid spread of SARS-like coronaviruses. While coronaviruses are not winter viruses as such – compared to other cold and influenza viruses – they nevertheless thrive in winter when not obstructed by those other winter pathogens.
Essentially the most significant locations for amplifying Covid19 were greater-Milan, the Italian skifields centred on Cortina and Livigno; though Torino in the northwest – host of the 2006 Games – probably experienced its share of the unchecked Italian Covid19 flow. From these places it spread to neighbouring countries: Austria, Switzerland, France, and Bavaria in Germany.
Who else was there at those resorts? The managerial class – the bureaucrat and technocrat nine-percenters of the most affluent cities of northwest Europe, especially those cities hosting international (Geneva, Brussels, Luxembourg and Strasbourg) and national (eg Stockholm for one; and Paris and Berlin of course) governance organisations – were there with their older children. Fly-in, fly-out; a week’s break from the office with the family. In many cases parents on their own with the children while their spouses and ex-spouses enjoyed time apart from their children; elite parents and teenagers who would take the opportunities to socialise during the long après-ski evenings. They would mostly be back in their home countries by the first week of March.
Visitors from the Americas – from those same socio-business milieux – would have also been in these resorts at that time, and also in the capital cities of western Europe.
Covid19 didn’t stream into New York from China or from Seattle. It streamed in from the affluent centres of and close to alpine Europe, and from the business and political capitals of northwest Europe. Covid19 came into the Americas directly or indirectly from Italy to a much greater extent than it came from anywhere else.
Missing Maps
What was needed was good flow maps, much like those devised by John Snow, in London around 1850, to chart the cholera epidemics of 1849 and 1854. Instead, the statistics most available were nationally-compiled accumulations of cases and deaths; not international flow maps showing the sequences as Covid19 moved from some places and then on to other places. Individual countries were making their own imperfect maps, with their own make-believe boundary walls. In reality these European borders were for administrative purposes only. Herein lay the problem of visualising the flows of infection; unjoined maps. Further, these case-maps were often unadjusted for the population sizes of each country or province; many maps simply showed that there were cases where there were more people.
For flow maps, you must remove the dots which represent cases resolved by time or, for a small minority of cases, by death. And you must provide per capita data.
These administrators literally failed to join the dots between their own patches and their neighbours’ patches. A glance at any Europe-wide case-map would have shown, by April 2020, a large cluster of cases from Geneva north towards Strasbourg and Luxembourg, and then west towards Maastricht and Brussels; this cluster straddled six separate national borders. (Seven countries if you include Italy, which is close to Geneva.) The conclusions from such a map would have been as obvious as those revealed by John Snow’s case-map of Soho (London) during the 1854 cholera outbreak there.
In early 2020, it was senior public servants, their families including their elderly parents, their staff, and the people they had meetings (and eatings) with who had been most effectively spreading and succumbing to the virus.
First and Second Waves
By July 2020, the Covid19 outbreak was largely contained in Europe. But at a cost, not only in terms of disrupted income-earning opportunities to the small-medium businesses personnel who contracted the virus from the holidaying returnees and who were most disrupted by stay-at-home orders. And also, the latent cost of the first wave included the loss of those many natural immunisations that commuters in large cities experience most days of their working lives; especially cities with international airports.
Thus, the countries which had experienced multi-month shutdowns rebuffed the pandemic virus at a significant hidden cost; a weakening of the immunity of the population, increasing the susceptibility of the so-far uninfected to a new wave of respiratory contagion. Populations in urban centres – historically, and especially immigrants to those cities from the provinces – have always been vulnerable to transmissible diseases. By August 2020 this was especially so, especially in those countries in Eastern Europe (with older and poorer populations) which had been minimally exposed to both the first wave of Covid19 and the other pathogens they would normally have come into frequent contact with.
While the pandemic was contained in Europe by July 2020, it was far from contained in the United States. In the United States, the covid curve was flattened, but at a high plateau. The downside of flattening-the-curve is that you get an extended curve, creating a pathogen reservoir for a second wave of infections.
The Grand Tour and the second wave of Covid19
In the eighteenth century, a time of very high economic inequality in the British Isles and other parts of Europe, a tradition developed among the sons of the then one-percenters to do a Grand Tour. For a few, that tour was somewhat intrepid; Joseph Banks did his grand tour on the Endeavour with James Cook. Lord Byron was another, whose tour was somewhat intrepid and was never completed.
For the majority of these entitled young men, there was a tourist trail that developed; the grand tour became a kind of hedonist pilgrimage. Principal stops included Paris, the Rhine lands (including Heidelburg) and Switzerland. Some of these early bohemian tourists headed directly from Switzerland to Italy; others ventured into Austria (especially Vienna) and the Bohemian capital of Prague.
In Italy there were several must-visit cities, including Milan, Venice, Florence, Rome and Naples. The homeward journey likely included Sicily, southern France and places in Spain and Portugal.
Some grand tourists would also visit the ‘Near East’, the areas – including the Holy Land – defined by the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean Seas.
The twenty-first (and late twentieth century) version of the grand tour is undertaken by the sons and daughters of American ten-percenters. In the United States in particular, working-life career-building requirements and surprisingly little annual leave strongly encourage this somewhat-elitist comparator to New Zealand’s OE. Young Americans have much less time than young Europeans to travel as tourists during their working lives.
In the modern Grand Tour, which lasts from mid-July to mid-September, young university-educated Americans with both left-elite (nine-percenter) and right-elite (one-percenter) backgrounds descend upon Europe. In 2020, this timing coincided with the re-opening of Europe after what the Europeans optimistically presumed was the end of the Covid19 pandemic. Further, European tourist hotspots were keen to welcome new waves of spending visitors, to help with their economic recoveries.
The second wave of the Covid19 pandemic began in August 2020, though this was not fully apparent until late September. The second wave was much more lethal than the first, and especially in Eastern Europe, where the (generally older) populations had largely escaped the first wave, but were particularly immunity-compromised as a result of the stay-at-home orders during the pandemic’s first wave.
The second wave began in places like Amsterdam, Paris, Barcelona, Switzerland, Czechia (especially Prague). And in Israel, another popular destination for American grand tourists. It was the American Grand Tour which brought the pandemic back to Europe, and with a vengeance; and which in turn instigated the further lethal waves of Covid19 around the world in 2021.
Unfortunately, thanks to inadequate specific-location-mapping and flow-mapping of the abundant Covid19 statistics, this flow of infections was only apparent to those who looked under the bonnet. By then, the national Wikipedia sites for Covid19 had lost their energy, showing increasingly outdated maps, and misplaced emphases on first-entry cases during the first wave. The accessible information was either too technical or too stale.
Popular Lore
In popular lore, the Covid19 pandemic was essentially a 2020 phenomenon. TV dramas and documentaries still emphasise that early period of the global crisis.
It was from the lethal second wave that the nasty new variants evolved, in 2021; and spread into and then from India, as the most spectacular example. Remember the Greek Alphabet soup, with the (British) Alpha and (Indian) Delta variants having been especially problematic.
The older Swedish scientists who emphasised the need to take a path – a path which accentuated the need for natural immunity to facilitate an early and complete end to the pandemic’s most dangerous phase – were proved correct as the pandemic raged through its most serious phase in 2021. Though you wouldn’t know it, probably too many interests did not want to make comparisons. Sweden’s politicians had been too slow to address the Stockholm outbreak in early 2020, when that country had an especially vulnerable elderly population; so, it looked as if the world had little to learn from that country. (Sweden had had significantly less influenza than most other countries, in 2018 and 2019; meaning that Sweden had unusually low death rates in the winters of those two years; meaning that they had plenty of ‘fuel’ for a tragic pandemic ‘fire’ in the spring of 2020.)
2021 also became the year of the Covid19 vaccine race; whereas 2020 had been the year of the missing PPE. The public health industry tends to place too much emphasis on immunisation through intervention versus immunisation through monitored natural exposures. This emphasis is valid for the most lethal of infectious conditions; the conditions for which we routinely vaccinate today. But for the below the radar circumstances of categories of common respiratory viruses with high complexity and low lethality – including known circulating viruses such as RSV, coronaviruses (the descendants of previous lethal coronaviruses), rhinoviruses, and influenzas –medicalised immunisations came to be emphasised while, with little awareness, simultaneous processes were lessening immunity to these types of virus. It was like taking one step forward and two steps back.
In the end, the pandemic was resolved through a natural immunisation process. 2022 was the year of Omicron. In 2022 the non-lethal Covid-Omicron variant ‘ripped through’ New Zealand and other places with previous minimal coronavirus exposure. This was a direct result of the failure and subsequent redundancy of the border-quarantine and other barrier methods of protection which were still in force in January 2022. Most New Zealand residents were exposed to covid that year.
Omicron had evolved in southern Africa in late 2021, from the earliest strain of Sars-Cov2. It became a natural immunisation force. Omicron was the invisible cavalry coming to the rescue; favoured in evolutionary terms over the Delta nemesis because it was more highly transmissible while being much less lethal than the previous covid varieties. More like the familiar but under-studied ‘common cold’ coronaviruses. Omicron stopped Delta dead in its tracks; a more effective weapon than the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.
Lessons
I don’t think that western society has learned very much from the Covid19 pandemic. The importance of good mapwork and monitored natural immunisation barely formed any part of the long but largely useless narrative. Sweden’s alternative scientific path was forgotten, or derided, rather than learned from.
The next pandemic will probably also catch us unawares. It will be as different from the contemporary preoccupations of epidemiology, as Covid19 was. It may already be ‘hiding in plain sight’, as the coronavirus threat was in the 2010s. Family doctors should be routinely testing for all the various ‘bugs’ out there, and passing-on data about the various pathogens and cross-immunities which keep us healthy in daily life. We could perhaps have knocked out Covid19 in its early stages, by facilitating natural exposures of healthy people to low doses of already-circulating non-covid coronaviruses.
I think that future government-overreach mandates around lockdowns and mask-wearing will be hard to enforce, given the huge rightwards shifts in western politics this decade. But there may be opportunities for short smart protective measures, undertaken at local levels and in places such as retirement villages and rest homes. In particular, making high-grade (ie the more expensive types of) facemasks available to the vulnerable, with the warning that these should be worn mainly in high-risk environments, and not everywhere all the time.
Meanwhile
It’s great that Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo, still popular hangouts of the rich and the not-so-famous, have been able to host a magnificent sporting event. These places have not been tainted by their association with the still recent pandemic. Despite being the places from which an outbreak of a significant new coronavirus fanned out to create a three-year pandemic that changed the world. That outbreak was probably containable, if we had acted with more nous and more knowledge of the common pathogens of daily life.
But who was looking at the Italian Alps in those heady ski-holiday days of February 2020? We were transfixed by China.
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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.
Over the last few days, there has been plenty of media chatter in relation to the government’s proposal to pass a law enabling police to forcibly shift street dwellers from Auckland’s CBD. (Refer ‘Move On’ orders penalise those with the least, Scoop 22 Feb 2026.)
Keith Rankin, trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.
While Labour likes to express outrage, neither Labour nor National have given as much as a hint as to a solution they would commit to implementing. National sees street vagrants in much the same way as the Israeli government sees Palestinians; in both cases, they just want the ‘problem people’ to go away.
New Zealand, like most countries, has a long history of vagrancy, and of mean-spirited laws to deal with it. New Zealand, however, in 1938 introduced a universal welfare state; a political contract which gained broad bipartisan support until 1984. Over the 1938 to 1984 period the vagrancy problem was minimal. I remember being shocked at seeing beggars in Ireland in 1976; that was depression-era optics, which I thought had long passed in the developed world.
The most recent time I ventured out of Australasia was in 2019, on a trip to Canada, Scotland, and London. I remember remarking that Vancouver seemed to have fewer homeless people than Auckland. The next day I changed my mind; I discovered that the problem in Vancouver was more on the edge of the CBD, whereas in Auckland it had already become normalised around Queen Street and the city’s main library. I note this point, because the problem cannot be blamed on the Covid19 pandemic, and it was a problem that neither Labour’s Jacinda Ardern nor Phil Goff were willing to prioritise during their terms in office (as Prime Minister, and as Mayor).
(In Scotland, while Aberdeen did have a problem, it was less obvious than in Auckland; and even less obvious in Edinburgh. In London, I stayed in Stepney Green, a social housing area close to Whitechapel, and did not particularly sense a ‘street dweller problem’ there; nor in closer-to-the-City and now-gentrified Spitalfields.)
The current chatter focuses on homelessness, while only noticing in passing that many street occupiers are also beggars; meaning that, at its core, the problem is one of income insecurity.
Hardly anyone has connected the dots between begging and the regression of social security in New Zealand. The universal welfare state has lost its way since 1984. My sense is that many of today’s vagrants are not receiving any social security money; and that that may be in large part because it is too difficult – and humiliating – for them to deal with a Kafkaesque system that calls beneficiaries ‘jobseekers’, and is forever looking for ways to not support vulnerable people into constructive engagement. While the general public would regard vagrants as being unemployed, Statistics New Zealand does not even count them as unemployed. Our governmental systems are oriented around the ‘labour force’, and are largely blind to working-age people ‘not in the labour force’.
It is not my role here to analyse the way that our untweaked version of capitalism creates vagrancy. Rather, it is to note that our vagrants need these three things: an amount of unconditional income, a place better than the street where they can sleep and wash, and something fulfilling – maybe, even, productive – to do.
While, for the rest of this essay I’ll focus on the former, I’ll just mention the latter briefly. Minimum wage laws put most of these people out of the reach of the formal labour market. That leaves them two choices for something societally connected to do; voluntary work, or petit-entrepreneurship (aka non-criminal hustling). (Two other options, both disconnected from mainstream society, are: ‘hanging out’ in ways that intimidate, or participating in underworld crime.)
A Very Basic Universal Income (VBUI)
As our income-tax scale stands at present, a Very Basic Universal Income of $150 – payable to every tax-resident aged over 18 – could be mostly funded by abandoning the 10.5% and 17.5% tax rates. All annual personal income below $78,100 would be subject to a 30% tax rate.
Non-beneficiaries earning less than $53,500 would gain, because their VBUI would be more than their extra tax. (For these people in fulltime work, the gain would be small; $12 per week for a minimum wage worker working 40 hours per week; $16 per week gain for a minimum wage worker working 37½ hours per week.)
In technical economists’ language, the VBUI would be called a ‘refundable tax credit’, or maybe a ‘demogrant’.
People earning more than $53,500 per year – and beneficiaries – would have an unchanged net income situation. (For beneficiaries, the first $150 of their benefits would become universal; an accounting change only, from a costing point-of-view.)
People on benefits would have the first $150 per week of their benefit recategorised. People losing their jobs would continue to receive their VBUI, unconditionally. People not in the labour force would have their VBUI payments made directly, and there would be an opt-out mechanism; not an opt-in.
The biggest gains come to non-beneficiaries aged over 18 defined in the official statistics as either ‘underemployed’, ‘part-time’, or ‘not in the labour force’. The most important gains are that the $150pw VBUI constitutes an unconditional safety-bridge for those in danger of becoming redundant, or of having their hours reduced to part-time; and that it thus acts as an ‘automatic stabiliser’, meaning that people who lose their incomes can still maintain some of their usual spending.
The VBUI also means that people who gain work, or who gain extra work, still get to keep all of their Very Basic Universal Income. There is no income or poverty trap (as there is now), whereby gains in income from a new source lead to reductions in income from existing sources.
And it also substantially reduces the cost of administering social security, if people who lose their jobs automatically retain a very basic income to help tide them over losses in market income. The only information needed about non-beneficiaries in New Zealand would be their date and place of birth, their bank account number, and their immigration status. People receiving no publicly-sourced income other than a VBUI would at no stage be required to provide the authorities with any further information; they would pay tax at the going rate to the IRD based on market income connected to their IRD number.
Very Basic Universal Income is an ‘opt-out’ mechanism, which means that everyone receives it unless they have specifically asked to not receive it. And, even then, opt-outs should be managed as ‘temporary’. (All people legally allowed to earn income in New Zealand would have at least an IRD or NHI [Health NZ] number; ‘bank accounts’ at Kiwibank could be opened by Inland Revenue or Health New Zealand for people without other known access to banking facilities.)
In addition to reduced administration costs, there are several other ways that a miserly government could recoup its not-very-onerous outlays on VBUI. The two most obvious ways would be to raise the company tax rate from 28% to 30%, and to reduce the income threshold for the 39% tax down from $180,000 per year. A centre-right government which has done all these things – all very much consistent with centre-right philosophy – might then aspire to removing the 33% tax rate. That would leave a two-step tax scale: 30% and 39%.
We note that the introduction of a VBUI would, in itself, mean only one change to the existing benefit structure. That one change would be the accounting formality to categorise the first $150 per week of a benefit as a universal income, as a ‘duty-of-care’ income integrated into both the tax system and the benefit system.
A VBUI is not generous, and it’s not a Universal Basic Income (UBI). But it does act as an income that acknowledges both human rights and economic efficiency. Once the mechanism and mindset are in place – noting that the ‘mindset’ issue is analogous with that associated with the introduction of proportional-representation voting in New Zealand in the 1990s – then it becomes comparatively easy to tweak the numbers. In time, the VBUI might become a BUI, a Basic Universal Income; more like $250pw than $150pw. We need to start at a low amount, to sooth the apprehensions of the professional naysayers; those unimaginative people too ready to block social and economic progress.
A Teenage Basic Universal Income (TBUI) for adolescents
Late in 1979, Robert Muldoon raised the universal family benefit to $6 per week – a benefit (which commenced in 1946) payable on behalf of all children without any means testing. If we adjust that $6 by the CPI changes we get an equivalent of $42 today. Or if we adjust by GDP per capita – a better measure than the CPI, a measure which allows for economic growth – that $6 in late 1979 becomes $70 today.
My proposal is to pay a TBUI of either $42 or $70, to all New Zealanders aged from 14 to 17. For many of these teenage recipients, the amount would be paid directly to the recipient, and deducted from the Family Tax Credit payment presently paid to their caregivers.
I have calculated that recipients of a $42 (or even $45) TBUI should face a special flat tax rate of no more than 20% of their market income. And recipients of a $70 TBUI should face a special flat tax rate of no more than 23% of their market income. I favour fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds – all still legally at school – to receive the $42; and sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds to receive the $70 and pay a bit more tax.
The TBUI acknowledges that a significant minority of New Zealand’s vagrant population is in the 14 to under-18 age range. They would receive payments in the same way as older vagrants; if necessary, through an account opened for them by the IRD or Health NZ.
Call it ‘pocket money’, if you like. All New Zealand residents would receive this from when they turn 14, unless they opt-out. Fourteen is the age, in New Zealand, when children may be legally left-alone, unsupervised. Thus, it is the first age to directly signal that a young person should have a degree of independence, of economic autonomy.
Finally
All of the payments I have suggested are very basic and somewhat stingy. What matters is that they are unconditional, and confer a sense of citizenship onto our most vulnerable adults and semi-adults. There are no poverty traps; no impediments to recipients from ‘bettering themselves’, from being aspirational. Universal Incomes are not withheld when persons’ circumstances improve.
I personally would prefer less parsimonious payments; deficit-funded payments which would give an underdone economy a necessary bit of stimulus, realising that the arising increase in collective prosperity itself recoups such fiscal deficits. (The 1938 introduction of Universal Superannuation and other reforms turned out to have a fiscal cost significantly less than the projected costs. Refer Elizabeth Hanson’s 1980 book: The Politics of Social Security…) I note that we live in austere times; without really knowing the reason for these fiscal blindspots. Nevertheless, I am suggesting that, even with Scrooge in charge, we can do much better than we do today.
Further, with these universal incomes in place, everyone will know that everyone else will know that all of our vagrant population is in receipt of at least some income. (Refer Steven Pinker’s 2025 book: When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows…) As it is, some of the beggars on the streets may be receiving substantial benefits, while others are receiving absolutely nothing; today we, in the public, are unable to tell any individual vagrant’s actual level of need.
There are solutions to these ‘all-rhetoric no-solution’ difficulties. It just takes the political will to see past our blindspots. Some form of rights-based universal income guarantee is a necessary but not a sufficient solution to the compounding vagrancy problem; and to other problems too, especially those problems affecting young people. (Note: Youth facing more psychological distress…, RNZ, 25 Feb 2026.)
Note on the Politics of Achievement
When Michael Joseph Savage in 1938 proposed (and then legislated for) a universal welfare state – with special emphasis on an initially very basic Universal Superannuation – he converted what could have been a political losing hand in that election year into New Zealand’s greatest ever electoral victory. There were many on the left and on the right of Savage’s parliamentary caucus – political people without political nous – who seemed to be eager to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Fortuitously, Savage was not one of them. By not being one of them, by not losing courage, he became the New Zealander of the twentieth century. Savage didn’t solve every problem. But he did make a difference, for the better; and was loved for that. While a modest man himself, his political leadership for New Zealand was far from austere.
Do our current lot of politicians even want to win in November? My advice to both National and Labour is to pursue the politics of success, and not the politics of nihilism.
(In this regard we might note that the Labour Opposition in 1931 suffered an ignominious election defeat, despite the appalling economic catastrophe which was then taking place. Labour went on to win in 1935, by promising a universal welfare state. It came close to electoral embarrassment in 1938; it came close to failing to deliver on its 1935 promise.)
*******
Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.
Keith Rankin, trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.
I heard this on RNZ News 11am 12 Feb 2026:
“The government’s finances are in better shape than expected due to lower [government] spending and a higher tax take. Treasury figures … show a deficit of $5.2b for the six months ended December, almost $1.6b below the half-year forecast. The tax take was $138m higher, while expenses were about $1b lower, because of lower spending on core government services: health, housing programmes, and the cost of carbon units. Net debt was slightly lower than expected, at 43.5% of the value of the economy.”
It was framed as good news, or at least as “better” news: government spending less than expected (despite the many dire needs for more, better funded, government-funded services and infrastructure) and a higher tax take (despite the needs of many people to have more spendable dollars).
I mention this quote from economic historian Adam Tooze, from his 2018 book Crashed, re the downward spiral that arises from policies of fiscal consolidation.
“Not only was [Greece, in 2010] slow to push through the changes the Troika demanded, but when it did the results were counterproductive; in a classic Keynesian downward spiral, demand fell and unemployment surged further, reducing incomes.”
We note that when private incomes are reduced, then income tax receipts are also reduced, meaning government income is reduced. (In idiomatic vernacular, this is known as cutting your nose to spite your face. “The idiom is often used in political and economic commentary to describe actions by a political actor, party, corporation or nation that appear to damage the actor’s own interests”.)
New Zealand is lucky at the moment in that it is benefitting from record high terms of trade – external stimulus, a commodity-led export-led boom – which is to some extent offsetting the fiscal doom loop that Tooze describes.
What will happen when those record-high export receipts fall-off? Tooze tells us: “a classic Keynesian downward spiral”.
Note that Greece was doing these policies, not out of political free-choice but because the EU Troika demanded that Greece follow this counterproductive policy path. At least Greece resisted, conferring upon itself some dignity.
New Zealand is today implementing similar policies; partly because the government is nominally free to choose, but also because it is heavily influenced by the false narratives peddled by another powerful Troika: the New York troika of Standard and Poor’s, Moody’s, and Fitch. New Zealand governments would rather lose elections than get on the wrong side of these big three.
Democracy or empire?
*******
Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.
Keith Rankin, trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.
The RNZ news bulletin of 10pm on 18 February stated: “New Zealand and Australia are outliers in having three-year parliamentary terms, with four or five year terms far more common … politicians have over the years expressed frustration at how much can be achieved in a three-year cycle.”
This is a common but not really valid belief. This year the world’s second largest democracy – United States of America – is holding its election for its House of Representatives. That country has – and has had – a stable two-year term. For some reason it is never mentioned in these discussions.
Below is a table showing average term lengths for comparator countries. We note that in countries with flexible electoral terms, which is all of these except United States, it is commonly only the more unpopular governments which go full-term.
Country
Average
Average
since 2010
since 1950
India
5.0
4.2
Italy
4.5
4.1
Ireland
4.3
3.7
France
4.0
4.1
Germany
4.0
3.8
Sweden
4.0
3.4
UK
3.5
3.7
Canada
3.5
3.1
New Zealand
3.0
3.0
Australia
3.0
2.6
Japan
2.8
2.8
USA
2.0
2.0
We note in particular that elections in the United Kingdom have been on average 3.7 years apart, despite that country having a five-year term limit. And that that country presently has a governing party for which popular support, as consistently measured by opinion polls, has so far registered below 20% for much of the so far short life of its rule. The fact that the likely date for the next election is more than three years away is a major source of political instability there.
Most importantly, in the table above, New Zealand is not an outlier.
*******
Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.
The Commonwealth Bank reportedly suspects around A$1 billion in home loans were obtained fraudulently, including through AI-generated documents. The Australian Financial Review says the bank has reported itself to police and the corporate watchdog to investigate.
According to sources quoted in the newspaper, Australia’s largest bank discovered the suspected fraud last year, partly thanks to two whistleblowers. After rival bank NAB was allegedly defrauded of around $150 million, the Commonwealth Bank also reportedly began investigating its own loans. Its Australian home loans alone are worth around $634 billion.
While the bank is yet to make any detailed comment on the case, a Commonwealth Bank spokesman said the industry faced “sustained and increasing levels of attempted fraud, driven by criminals who actively evolve their methods”.
This is an industry-wide challenge, with fraud being attempted through mortgage broking and referral channels.
Even though I’ve been warning about the need to make AI companies do more to stop facilitating crime, the sheer scale of this suspected fraud still surprised me.
We should assume criminals won’t only have been targeting the Commonwealth Bank and NAB, but that they’re trying all the banks.
This case has implications for all of us: from individuals to business owners wanting to avoid being fooled by fake AI invoices, to the banks, our government regulators and the AI companies themselves.
Don’t panic – but expect tighter security
First of all, given the Commonwealth Bank has 17 million customers, let’s be clear: this won’t be a $1 billion loss for the bank.
From what we’ve heard so far, the bank should be able to recover a significant amount of this money. These loans are reportedly being paid off, and there are bricks-and-mortar properties involved to sell if needed too.
But even for a bank as big as the Commonwealth, $1 billion is no loose change. After suspected fraud on this scale, I suspect we are going to see all banks ramp up their security.
[embedded content]
As customers, we should expect to be asked to do more to secure our accounts and secure our transactions. We’re also increasingly likely to need to use biometric authentication (such as facial recognition), as well as two-factor authentication.
I also think it’s likely to mean that, in future, we’ll need go into the bank to show ourselves along with our original documents – to a real person. That will be a lot less convenient than just providing certified copies to a mortgage broker. However, it’s also a lot more secure.
That way, the bank can see the real, physical passport, with its holograms and stamps, which are hard to reproduce.
Faking financial or identification documents with AI is now free and easy. For example, only last year we heard how ChatGPT could be used to forge passports.
Given the Commonwealth Bank is reportedly investigating the role of mortgage brokers and others in this suspected fraud, it’s likely we’ll see banks make mortgage brokers go through more hoops too.
And the Commonwealth isn’t the only bank offering loans. So people should be asking questions of their own bank: have you uncovered fraud like this in your own loan book? And what are you doing about it?
What regulators and governments need to do
As well as being used for fraud, AI is also being used by the banks to try to detect and catch scammers.
AI can be very helpful in looking for strange patterns – for instance, why a mortgage broker is suddenly submitting three times as many home loan applications?
But fraud on this scale, affecting Australia’s biggest bank, does show the federal government needs to stop saying we don’t need any new AI regulation. We just don’t have adequate safeguards in place.
Rethinking how we pay bills and do business
Whether you’re a business owner or an individual, if someone sends you a large invoice to pay, don’t pay it until you’re sure it’s real.
It’s just so easy to “spoof” (mimic) someone’s web address, email or invoice, especially the first time you’re paying someone.
We’ve seen too many cases of “middle men” attacks, where criminals get between a person and the company they’re trying to pay, then change the bank details.
There are some terrible stories about how people have transferred their deposit to buy a house to what they thought was the solicitor’s account. But it was changed – and they lost their whole deposit.
My rule of thumb is that any time it’s a first-time payment, or sum of money large enough to really hurt you, call whoever you’re paying over the phone and confirm their bank details are correct.
In a spectacular triumph, Britain’s Green Party has won the Gorton and Denton byelection in Greater Manchester.
Local plumber Hannah Spencer has now become the party’s fifth MP — a historic victory for the ascendent Greens, who ran a campaign of national hope and international solidarity against Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
The byelection result is also a huge upset in Britain’s political status quo.
The Labour party, which won the seat with more than 50 percent of the vote in 2024 and held the seat for many years, was pushed into third place behind Reform UK. No more.
After coming third behind the Greens and Reform, questions over the future of the party’s leader, Prime Minister Keir Starmer, now grow increasingly urgent.
Meanwhile, Reform UK came second. On their own terms, a result.
Clear defeat by Left And yet, a clear defeat by the Left. Its candidate, Matt Goodwin, along with the party as a whole, will now be taking stock, disappointed that a major target constituency has rejected them.
The Greens stormed the seat and Spencer won a majority of more than 4000 despite a race sullied by dirty tricks and cynicism from a Labour Party that appeared desperate at every turn.
Tactics included an invented electoral organisation and misinformation over polling. A last ditch effort to transport Starmer to the constituency may have amounted to a final and fatal backfire.
This is the second byelection loss to the Green Party since Labour’s general election victory in 2024.
Amnesty International has condemned Israeli authorities over unleashing a series of unlawful measures deliberately designed to dispossess Palestinians in the occupied West Bank — including East Jerusalem — and to make the annexation of the territory an irreversible reality.
These decisions since December 2025 represent an unprecedented escalation – in scale and speed – in Israel’s project to expand illegal settlements.
They facilitate the takeover of more Palestinian land, authorise a record number of new settlements, expanding existing ones, and formalise registration of land in the West Bank as Israeli state property.
While successive Israeli governments have pursued policies aimed at expanding settlements and entrenching occupation and apartheid, the latest measures underscore how the current Israeli government has turbocharged these efforts, in the shadow of the genocide in Gaza.
“What we are witnessing is a state, led by a Prime Minister wanted by the International Criminal Court on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity, openly gloating about its defiance of international law,” said Erika Guevara-Rosas, Amnesty International’s senior director for research, advocacy, policy and campaigns.
“Despite hundreds of UN resolutions, Advisory Opinions from the International Court of Justice and global condemnation, Israel continues to brazenly expand illegal settlements, entrenching its cruel system of apartheid and destroying Palestinian lives and livelihoods.
“The unconditional support of the USA government, combined with the pervasive lack of international accountability for Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, decades of crimes under international law linked to its unlawful occupation and its system of apartheid, has further emboldened Israel to escalate its illegal actions.
‘Formalising land grabs’ “This includes formalising land grabs with full confidence that it will face no consequences.
“The accelerating expansion of unlawful settlements and the rise in state-backed settler violence and crimes across the occupied West Bank are a direct indictment of the international community’s catastrophic failure to take decisive action.”
— Erika Guevara-Rosas, Amnesty International’s senior director for research, advocacy, policy and campaigns.
“The accelerating expansion of unlawful settlements and the rise in state-backed settler violence and crimes across the occupied West Bank are a direct indictment of the international community’s catastrophic failure to take decisive action.
“Third states have failed to respect their own legal obligations, refusing to use the tools at their disposal, such as suspension of the EU Israel Association Agreement, to deter Israel from pursuing its unlawful agenda.”
On 10 December 2025, the Israel Land Authority published a tender for 3401 housing units in the E1 area, east of Jerusalem in the occupied West Bank.
The plan seeks to expand the illegal settlement of Ma’ale Adumim and create a continuum with occupied East Jerusalem.
This would sever the West Bank in two, permanently rupturing urban Palestinian contiguity between Ramallah, occupied East Jerusalem, and Bethlehem.
Forced transfer of Palestinians Together with the construction of a bypass road which was set to begin this month, this plan will also lead to the forcible transfer of the Palestinian communities living in the area.
While since the 1990s successive Israeli governments have attempted to implement the E1 plan, it remained largely dormant for decades due to international pressure.
Its current advancement with such speed signifies a government that is brazenly pursuing its settlement expansion agenda amidst insufficient international pushback.
Since its occupation of Palestinian territory in 1967, Israel has introduced and developed an oppressive administrative and legal architecture of dispossession and control against Palestinians.
The current government has been relentlessly accelerating this project by fast-tracking settlement expansion and land seizures.
On 11 December 2025, Israel’s security cabinet approved plans to establish 19 new settlements, bringing the total number approved by the current coalition government to 68 in just three years and the total number of official settlements to about 210.
About 750,000 Israeli settlers currently live illegally in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.
Retroactive ‘legalisation’ The new settlements include the retroactive “legalisation” of outposts built in violation of even Israel’s own domestic laws.
Credible media reports indicate at least three of these sites sit upon land from which Palestinian communities, such as Ein Samia and Ras Ein al-Ouja, were recently forcibly transferred following state-backed settler violence.
According to Peace Now, an Israeli organisation monitoring settlement expansion, in 2025 alone, a record 86 outposts were established, primarily “herding” or “farming” outposts” which have significantly contributed to the spike in state-backed settler violence and forcible transfer of Palestinian communities.
Protected by the Israeli military and funded by the Israeli Ministry of Agriculture, the outposts have turned the lives of Palestinian farmers and shepherds, particularly in Area C, into a “living hell”.
Settlers in the outposts aggressively prevent Palestinian shepherds from accessing their grazing land, depriving them of their main livelihood, as well as seizing land by force, vandalizing property, stealing livestock and attacking Palestinians and their homes.
According to the Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem, 21 Palestinian communities were fully or partially uprooted in 2025 as a result of state-backed settler violence.
A mother of three from Ras Ein al-Ouja, near Jericho, told Amnesty International: “The fear of attacks forced us to put our children to bed with their shoes on, because we might have to flee at any moment.”
Freezing cold In January 2026, she and her family were driven out in the freezing cold along with another 122 families — in total more than 600 Palestinians have been forcibly displaced from this community.
A declaration by the Israeli civil administration on 5 January 2026 designating 694 dunams of land belonging to the Palestinian towns of Deir Istiya, Bidya and Kafr Thulth in the northern West Bank as “state land”.
This was declared along with a series of measures to expand control over the West Bank announced by Israel’s security cabinet on February 8 to mark a further escalation in Israel’s land grabs.
These measures include repealing Jordanian legislation still in force to allow Israeli settlers to purchase Palestinian land without oversight increasing Israeli civil administrative control over planning and construction in Hebron City and Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem, as well as granting Israeli authorities new enforcement powers in archaeological sites and in issues related to water and environment in Areas A and B.
On 15 February 2026, the Israeli cabinet issued a decision that amounts to annexation under Israeli law.
It allocated more than 244 million NIS (Israeli shekels) for the establishment of a government mechanism to facilitate land registration in Area C, transferring the powers of land registration from the civil administration to Israel’s Ministry of Justice.
Currently, nearly 58 percent of the land in Area C of the occupied West Bank is unregistered, according to Peace Now.
Seized Palestinian land Israel has already seized more than half of that area through state land designations.
Palestinians face almost insurmountable hurdles to prove land ownership due to Israel’s archaic interpretation of Ottoman land laws which require Palestinians to provide an array of documents, maps and other records that most Palestinians do not have access to.
“Make no mistake: full annexation is the goal, and Israel has already laid much of the groundwork for achieving it. Ministers in the current Israeli government no longer feel any need to conceal their intentions.”
— Erika Guevara-Rosas
“Land registration is yet another Israeli euphemism for land grabs and dispossession. Make no mistake: full annexation is the goal, and Israel has already laid much of the groundwork for achieving it,” Erika Guevara-Rosas said.
“Ministers in the current Israeli government no longer feel any need to conceal their intentions.
“Israel has totally disregarded its obligations as an Occupying Power towards Palestinian civilians and instead has deliberately and consistently advanced its aggressive annexation agenda, in blatant violation of international law, which categorically prohibits annexation and establishment of settlements in occupied territory.
“These measures are in brazen defiance of the International Court of Justice’s Advisory Opinions of 2004 and 2024, the latter of which unequivocally found Israel’s presence in the OPT to be unlawful.
“A subsequent UN General Assembly resolution set September 2025 as the deadline to end Israel’s unlawful occupation.
“Yet instead of complying, Israel has simply invented new ways to violate international law, further entrenching its unlawful occupation and apartheid — while the international community continues, at best, to pay lip service to Palestinians’ rights and taken no effective action.”
Recently some Australian shoppers got more than they bargained for when they chatted with Woolworths’ artificial intelligence (AI) assistant, Olive.
Instead of sticking to groceries, recipes and basket suggestions, Olive reportedly produced strange, overly human-like responses. It talked about its “mother” and offered other personal-sounding details.
Further testing revealed pricing errors for basic items. And when I asked about the price of a specific product, Olive didn’t provide a clear answer. Instead, it checked whether the item was in stock and explained pickup fees.
So what exactly is going on here? And what lessons might these incidents hold for businesses and consumers alike?
What actually happened?
Olive is powered by a large language model (LLM). These models don’t “know” things the way humans do, nor do they have mothers. Using elaborate statistical analyses, they generate language that sounds plausible.
Comments from a Woolworths spokesperson to the Australian Financial Review suggest that in Olive’s case, the references to its supposed mother appear to have been pre-written scripts dating back several years.
When users entered something that looked like a birthdate, the system likely triggered a matching “fun fact” from an old decision tree with pre-programmed responses.
Woolworths says it has now removed this particular scripting “as a result of customer feedback”.
The pricing errors point to a different problem.
Because LLMs generate responses based on learned patterns rather than real-time data, they do not automatically know today’s prices unless they are explicitly connected to a live database.
If that grounding step is weak, the system can produce outdated prices.
Not a new problem
Woolworths is not the first company to discover, after the fact, that its customer-facing AI had unexpectedly “misbehaved”.
When Air Canada refused to honour the chatbot’s advice, Moffatt sued the airline and won.
Air Canada’s defence was striking. It argued the chatbot was a separate legal entity, responsible for its own actions and therefore beyond the airline’s liability. The tribunal rejected this outright. It ruled that a chatbot is part of a company’s website, and that the company owns its outputs.
In January 2024, UK parcel delivery firm DPD faced a different kind of embarrassment. A frustrated customer who could not get help to locate a missing parcel asked DPD’s chatbot to write a poem that criticised the company. It did. He then asked it to swear. It did that too. The exchange went viral on social media. DPD disabled the chatbot shortly after.
Both cases point to the same underlying failure: companies launched customer-facing AI without adequate oversight and were caught off-guard by the consequences.
What is Woolworths’ responsibility?
Woolworths operates the largest supermarket chain in Australia. It has promoted Olive as a trusted, convenient interface for its customers, who are reasonable to expect that the information Olive provides is accurate.
Woolworths admits its AI assistant can make mistakes.Woolworths
Admitting that Olive may make mistakes, as Woolworths does when a user opens the chatbot, does not sit easily with that expectation.
There is also a broader ethical dimension. Woolworths serves customers who, in many cases, are making careful decisions about household budgets.
That context makes the Olive pricing errors harder to dismiss as an isolated technical glitch.
Companies that deploy AI in customer-facing roles take on a duty of care to ensure those systems are accurate and honestly presented. That duty does not diminish because the technology is new.
Why do companies keep making chatbots that pretend to be your friend?
The logic behind Olive’s programmed personality is not without basis.
Research on human-computer interaction consistently finds that people respond positively to interfaces that feel conversational and warm. Human-like chatbots that have a name and personality tend to generate higher customer engagement, satisfaction, and trust.
For companies, the commercial appeal is straightforward: a customer who feels at ease with a chatbot is more likely to complete a transaction and return.
However, this comes with a significant risk. When an anthropomorphised chatbot fails to meet the expectations its personality has created, customers tend to be more dissatisfied than they would have been with a plainly mechanical system.
This “expectation violation” means that the warmer the persona, the harder the fall.
The larger stakes
The Olive episode is a reminder that deploying AI in customer-facing roles is not a set-and-forget exercise.
A chatbot that quotes wrong prices and rambles about its family is not a quirky inconvenience but a sign that something in the development and oversight process has broken down.
For Woolworths, and for the many other companies now rushing to put AI in front of their customers, the lesson is clear: accountability cannot be outsourced to an algorithm. When a business puts a system in front of the public, it owns what that system says and does.
There is a lesson for consumers, too.
AI assistants may feel confident and conversational, but they are still tools, not authorities. If something seems unclear, inconsistent or too good to be true, it is worth double-checking.
As AI becomes a routine part of everyday transactions, a small measure of healthy scepticism may prove just as important as technological innovation.
The Commonwealth Bank reportedly suspects around A$1 billion in home loans were obtained fraudulently, including through AI-generated documents. The Australian Financial Review says the bank has reported itself to police and the corporate watchdog to investigate.
According to sources quoted in the newspaper, Australia’s largest bank discovered the suspected fraud last year, partly thanks to two whistleblowers. After rival bank NAB was allegedly defrauded of around $150 million, the Commonwealth Bank also reportedly began investigating its own loans. Its Australian home loans alone are worth around $634 billion.
While the bank is yet to make any detailed comment on the case, a Commonwealth Bank spokesman said the industry faced “sustained and increasing levels of attempted fraud, driven by criminals who actively evolve their methods”.
This is an industry-wide challenge, with fraud being attempted through mortgage broking and referral channels.
Even though I’ve been warning about the need to make AI companies do more to stop facilitating crime, the sheer scale of this suspected fraud still surprised me.
We should assume criminals won’t only have been targeting the Commonwealth Bank and NAB, but that they’re trying all the banks.
This case has implications for all of us: from individuals to business owners wanting to avoid being fooled by fake AI invoices, to the banks, our government regulators and the AI companies themselves.
Don’t panic – but expect tighter security
First of all, given the Commonwealth Bank has 17 million customers, let’s be clear: this won’t be a $1 billion loss for the bank.
From what we’ve heard so far, the bank should be able to recover a significant amount of this money. These loans are reportedly being paid off, and there are bricks-and-mortar properties involved to sell if needed too.
But even for a bank as big as the Commonwealth, $1 billion is no loose change. After suspected fraud on this scale, I suspect we are going to see all banks ramp up their security.
[embedded content]
As customers, we should expect to be asked to do more to secure our accounts and secure our transactions. We’re also increasingly likely to need to use biometric authentication (such as facial recognition), as well as two-factor authentication.
I also think it’s likely to mean that, in future, we’ll need go into the bank to show ourselves along with our original documents – to a real person. That will be a lot less convenient than just providing certified copies to a mortgage broker. However, it’s also a lot more secure.
That way, the bank can see the real, physical passport, with its holograms and stamps, which are hard to reproduce.
Faking financial or identification documents with AI is now free and easy. For example, only last year we heard how ChatGPT could be used to forge passports.
Given the Commonwealth Bank is reportedly investigating the role of mortgage brokers and others in this suspected fraud, it’s likely we’ll see banks make mortgage brokers go through more hoops too.
And the Commonwealth isn’t the only bank offering loans. So people should be asking questions of their own bank: have you uncovered fraud like this in your own loan book? And what are you doing about it?
What regulators and governments need to do
As well as being used for fraud, AI is also being used by the banks to try to detect and catch scammers.
AI can be very helpful in looking for strange patterns – for instance, a mortgage broker is suddenly submitting three times as many home loan applications?
But fraud on this scale, affecting Australia’s biggest bank, does show the federal government needs to stop saying we don’t need any new AI regulation. We just don’t have adequate safeguards in place.
Rethinking how we pay bills and do business
Whether you’re a business owner or an individual, if someone sends you a large invoice to pay, don’t pay it until you’re sure it’s real.
It’s just so easy to “spoof” (mimic) someone’s web address, email or invoice, especially the first time you’re paying someone.
We’ve seen too many cases of “middle men” attacks, where criminals get between a person and the company they’re trying to pay, then change the bank details.
There are some terrible stories about how people have transferred their deposit to buy a house to what they thought was the solicitor’s account. But it was changed – and they lost their whole deposit.
My rule of thumb is that any time it’s a first-time payment, or sum of money large enough to really hurt you, call whoever you’re paying over the phone and confirm their bank details are correct.
A common mould has killed two people, and left four others seriously ill, at one of Sydney’s largest hospitals.
Health authorities are investigating a cluster of fungal infections at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital’s transplant unit.
Six patients developed infections between October and December 2025 after being exposed to Aspergillus, a common mould found in soil, plants, dust and damp environments.
In a statement, a hospital spokesperson suggested the mould may have been present at nearby construction sites, part of the hospital’s A$940 million redevelopment.
So what is Aspergillus? And should you be concerned?
It’s a common mould?
Yes. Aspergillus moulds are a type of filamentous fungi, meaning they form long chains, and are usually found in soil, plants and damp areas.
This type of mould is usually harmless to healthy people. But it can cause a severe respiratory disease called aspergillosis. Aspergillosis affects about 250,000 people around the world.
How can Aspergillus harm?
This type of mould produces airborne spores, which people may inhale into their lungs.
There, these spores can cause an infection in the smallest chambers of the lungs. This is because they release toxins and enzymes that damage lung tissue. These spores can spread to other parts of the body such as the brain, kidneys, heart or skin, causing further infection.
Symptoms of an infection include fever, cough and chest pain. You may have trouble breathing or might start coughing up blood. Aspergillus can also cause skin and eye infections.
Our immune systems can generally fight Aspergillus infections. But people with weakened immune systems have a much higher risk of developing an infection.
These include people having chemotherapy, corticosteroid treatment, or organ or stem cell transplants. Transplant patients are particularly vulnerable. This is because their immune system must be deliberately weakened to stop their body rejecting the transplanted organ. If they somehow inhale Aspergillus spores, the fungus can more easily take hold in their lungs.
Dormant spores in the lungs of transplant patients may also cause infection when the spores are activated. But health authorities did not indicate this occurred at the Sydney hospital.
One large US study found just 59% of organ transplant recipients and 25% of stem cell transplant patients were still alive one year after developing invasive aspergillosis.
People with asthma may develop allergies to Aspergillus even if their immune systems are healthy. And it can cause severe allergic reactions in people with cystic fibrosis, a genetic condition in which sticky mucus blocks their airways. People with other lung conditions such as tuberculosis, influenza or COVID are also at a higher risk of developing an Aspergillus infection.
What are the treatment options?
Aspergillus can be treated with antifungal drugs such as itraconazole and corticosteroids. This treatment is most effective when we detect the infection early.
But researchers have identified strains of Aspergillus that don’t respond to this kind of treatment. So antifungal resistance is an urgent problem.
What else do I need to know?
Aspergillus infections are relatively uncommon in the general population. And they are rare in hospitals, where wards and rooms are usually fitted with high-efficiency particulate air, or HEPA, filters. These filters capture and remove potentially harmful particles from the air.
However, construction work may disturb the soil near or around the hospital, releasing a high number of Aspergillus spores into the air. This increases the risk of hospitals having clusters of infection. It remains unclear whether this is what happened at The Royal Prince Alfred Hospital.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Milad Haghani, Associate Professor and Principal Fellow in Urban Risk and Resilience, The University of Melbourne
This week, images on social media showed global superstar Ed Sheeran alighting from the overnight train from Sydney into the decidedly utilitarian surrounds of Southern Cross Station in Melbourne.
In Australia for an international tour, the $700 million star chose to travel 11 hours overnight by train, rather than take a one-hour flight. Media stories speculating at his motive noted Sheeran’s wife, Cherry Seaborn, is a consultant in sustainability and encourages him to travel on public transport to save emissions.
Sheeran has also been open about his plan to buy land and “rewild” as much of the United Kingdom as he can, saying: “I love my county and I love wildlife and the environment.”
In a live touring industry built around tight schedules and frequent air travel, Sheeran’s decision may be a symbolic gesture, driven by a desire to reduce his carbon footprint.
Australia hosts hundreds of live events such as concerts and music festivals each year. In 2024 alone, the live entertainment sector drew more than 31 million attendances, including more than 14 million concertgoers. Across the country, more than 160 music festivals are staged each year.
Sell-out concerts at a huge scale, such as Sheeran’s, inevitably come with a major environmental footprint.
How large is the carbon footprint of major concerts and events? Where do those emissions come from? Is anything being done to reduce them; and why should the event industry care in the first place?
Musician Ed Sheeran has been public about his love of the environment.Justin Lane/AAP
Estimates suggest emissions average around 5kg of CO₂ per attendee per day, though impacts vary considerably depending on travel patterns and the way events are designed.
There is no agreed global estimate of the total carbon footprint of concerts or major events globally. Most impacts are calculated on an event-by-event basis.
That level of emissions is broadly comparable to the annual carbon footprint of more than 230,000 average passenger cars.
An event’s carbon footprint reflects the activities required to bring together and service the crowds. Carbon audits typically account for how audiences travel to the venue, where they stay, what they eat and drink, how the site is powered, and how waste is managed.
The interior of an XPT train sleeper car, typical in the trip between Sydney and Melbourne.MDRX/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA
The key emission contributors
While public attention often focuses on artist travel and sound systems, evidence shows these are rarely the main drivers of emissions.
The largest contributor is audience travel. Multi-city concert analyses covering multiple large-scale international tours found transport by attendees creates 38 times more emissions than artist and crew travel, hotel stays and gear transportation combined.
Accommodation for major events typically contributes a secondary share of emissions, particularly when concerts attract interstate or international visitors requiring overnight stays.
Other emissions sources include food and beverage services, venue energy use and production, freight and touring logistics, and waste management. Each of those typically account for a much smaller share of total event emissions.
How are organisers and bands responding?
There is growing environmental awareness across the live music industry. In recent years, artists, promoters and venues have begun experimenting with ways to reduce the environmental footprint of their live events.
Much of this has focused on energy use and touring operations.
British band Coldplay, for example, reported that its Music of the Spheres world tour reduced direct touring emissions by about 60%, compared with its 2016–17 stadium tour. This was based on a show-by-show comparison, and verified by independent audits. Coldplay achieved this mainly by replacing diesel generators with battery-powered systems, using renewable energy, and redesigning freight and touring logistics, or even incorporating kinetic energy systems such as power-generating dance floors and bicycles.
Their tour also funded a large-scale tree-planting initiative; one tree for every ticket sold. The program has so far supported the planting of millions of trees worldwide.
Massive Attack also made headlines last year after staging the ACT 1.5 concert in Bristol, described as one of the lowest-carbon live music events ever held. It used battery-powered energy systems instead of diesel generators, plant-based catering, reduced freight logistics and offered incentives for low-carbon audience travel.
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Coldplay have significantly reduced their carbon emissions when touring.
Where to now? The audience needs to change
While these efforts are encouraging, evidence consistently shows that even low-emissions concerts might achieve limited overall reductions unless audience travel behaviour also changes.
Industry guidance from Green Music Australia identifies fan transport as one of the largest remaining emission sources, and prompts organisers to experiment with public-transport incentives, venue selection and travel partnerships.
Technological improvements on stage are becoming increasingly achievable. But influencing how tens of thousands of people travel to events remains the hard bit.
Gestures such as Sheeran choosing the train over flying may appear symbolic, but symbols matter. They help make lower-carbon choices seem normal, and reinforce environmental values across an industry already confronting the impacts of climate change on live events.
A recent global analysis of more than 2,000 mass gatherings disrupted by extreme weather between 2004 and 2024 across several high-income countries around the world found that arts, cultural and entertainment events – particularly festivals and concerts – were among those most frequently affected by climate change.
Storms, heat and other climate-related disruptions are already altering event timing and financial viability across countries including Australia, the UK and the United States.
In other words, the live events industry is not only contributing to climate emissions; it is increasingly exposed to their consequences.
Efforts to reduce the emissions footprint of large events and concerts should become an core part of the broader adaptation challenges facing the events industry. Its very existence depends on stable environmental and climate conditions.
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