Global Pulse

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  • NAB reveals huge plunge in mortgages as central bank rejects property rescue

    NAB reveals huge plunge in mortgages as central bank rejects property rescue

    Australia’s housing and mortgage lending sector is facing fresh headwinds, with one of the nation’s largest financial institutions revealing a sharp downturn in new home loan activity even as the country’s central bank confirms it will not introduce emergency policy adjustments to stabilize a cooling property market.

    In an early pre-report disclosure to investors, National Australia Bank (NAB) confirmed that total home loan applications dropped by 15% over the past three months. The steep decline is attributed to a confluence of economic pressures: three consecutive interest rate hikes that lifted the cash rate by 75 basis points to start 2026, recent changes to property taxation, and elevated global fuel prices that have combined to erode investor confidence in the housing market. The bank’s full quarterly financial results are scheduled for official release on August 17, with the early update focusing on preliminary trends across its business and private banking divisions.

    Speaking at the Barrenjoey Annual Australia Economics Forum, Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) Assistant Governor and Chief Economist Sarah Hunter made clear that the central bank has no plans to automatically adjust monetary policy to offset falling property values. While Hunter acknowledged that the housing market holds major economic and social importance, she emphasized that the RBA’s policy decisions are tied strictly to its statutory dual mandate: maintaining inflation between 2% and 3%, and supporting full employment.

    “We don’t mechanically respond to falling house prices, but the housing market is really important. It is clearly very emotive as well. Everyone needs to live somewhere …. but no, we don’t just mechanically respond to what happens in the housing market. We think about its impact on the economy and think about it from a monetary policy lens,” Hunter explained.

    The 75 basis point rate hikes implemented in early 2026 reversed the three consecutive rate cuts that the RBA rolled out in 2025, a shift designed to curb persistent inflation that has remained above the central bank’s target band. New inflation data released Wednesday put headline annual inflation at 3.8% through June, while the trimmed mean inflation measure — a key metric that strips out the most volatile price movements to track underlying inflation — came in at 3.6% for the 12-month period.

    Hunter added that the RBA is closely monitoring the spillover effects of cooling housing prices on broader economic activity, employment, and inflation. While the central bank has flagged ongoing concern about household financial stability amid rising mortgage costs, Hunter stressed that there are currently no signs of systemic stress in the lending market. She acknowledged that for a small subset of borrowers, higher interest rates have made monthly mortgage repayments significantly harder to manage, but said struggling individual borrowers will not drive targeted policy action.

    Hunter’s remarks align with recent comments from RBA Governor Michele Bullock, who recently acknowledged that property prices have fallen faster than the central bank projected in its May forecasts. Bullock noted that the faster-than-expected cooling stems from a mix of shifting monetary policy outlooks, recent policy changes impacting housing, and a broad softening in consumer and investor sentiment toward the market.

    Even with the recent declines, Bullock pointed out that national property prices remain largely aligned with levels seen before the RBA began its current cycle of rate hikes in February 2026, and the downturn has so far been concentrated in Australia’s two largest cities, Sydney and Melbourne. First-home buyers, she added, are less exposed to the current price correction, as the largest drops have occurred in previously high-value markets, while historically affordable regions have seen more modest changes.

    On the question of financial risk, Bullock confirmed that negative equity — a scenario where a borrower owes more on their mortgage than their home is worth — remains extremely rare, affecting less than 1% of all Australian mortgage holders. The vast majority of households have also retained the substantial savings buffers they built up in recent years, meaning severe repayment distress is limited to a very small share of borrowers. While Bullock said the hardship facing this small group should not be minimized, she confirmed that overall financial stability risks remain contained.

  • New Victorian Premier Ben Carroll hints at changes to state’s WFH laws in potential upset to new reforms

    New Victorian Premier Ben Carroll hints at changes to state’s WFH laws in potential upset to new reforms

    Just 72 hours after being sworn in as Victoria’s newest Premier, Ben Carroll has already opened the door to potential adjustments to a landmark work-from-home law that has divided workers’ advocates and business groups across the Australian state. The controversial legislation, which was originally brought forward by former Premier Jacinta Allan just weeks before her unexpected resignation from the top job, is now up for review as the new leadership weighs competing demands from labor and industry.

    Carroll confirmed this week that the core provision of the bill — a legal guarantee allowing eligible workers to work from home for up to two days per week when the arrangement is reasonable — will remain in the draft text. However, he has signaled a willingness to consider sensible amendments during the upcoming parliamentary debate, responding to weeks of fierce pushback from Victorian business associations.

    “Work from home does work for families, and now it will go through that parliamentary process, and we will consider anything that is sensible,” Carroll told reporters on Thursday. “Sensible changes will always come up in any debate, and like any other debate, they will be considered.” “That’s the plan,” he added, confirming the two-day right remains on the table.

    Under the original framework outlined by Allan, the right to two days of remote work per week would apply to full-time employees, with pro rata entitlements extended to part-time and regular casual workers. Exclusions are already built in for workers on probation, apprentices, trainees, interns, and participants in entry-level graduate programs. When Allan first introduced the bill in June, she framed it as a pro-worker reform that would save the average employee more than AUD 5,000 annually in commuting costs, cut urban road congestion, and cut down on daily travel time for thousands of workers across the state.

    “We know that working from home works, it works for families, it works for parents,” Allan said at the time, framing the policy as a key priority for the state Labor government ahead of the upcoming election.

    But the proposal quickly drew sharp criticism from peak business groups across Victoria, who argue the new rules would impose unmanageable burdens on small and medium-sized businesses already struggling with economic headwinds. The Victorian Congress of Employer Associations has repeatedly called for a full overhaul of the legislation, warning the original timeline to bring the law into effect by September — which would require rapid processing through the state parliament after the bill passed the lower house earlier this week — is far too compressed.

    “The proposed commencement timetable is also dangerously compressed,” a congress spokesperson said earlier this month. “This would leave employers scrambling to rewrite policies, establish new processes, assess safety obligations, understand cost liabilities, train managers and respond to employee notices under an entirely new legal regime.”

    The group has also warned that the new regulations would add unnecessary complexity, extra operational costs, and economic uncertainty at a time when the state is already seeing a decline in the number of small employing businesses. Business leaders have called for a clearer hard limit on remote work entitlements and a six-month delay to the implementation timeline to give businesses enough time to adjust.

    The sudden review of the work-from-home law follows a rapid leadership shakeup in Victoria’s state Labor government that saw Allan step down from the premiership earlier this week. The leadership contest began after Carroll, who had previously served as Allan’s deputy and had publicly pledged not to challenge her leadership, confirmed he would run for the top job. Allan announced her resignation on Tuesday, arguing that a prolonged internal leadership contest so close to the upcoming state election would waste critical time and government resources.

    “I was prepared to put my record and my plan to a ballot of members as our rules allow,” Allan said in her resignation statement. “I believe I would have won but doing so this close to an election takes up valuable resources including the most important one: time.”

    Now, just days after taking office, Carroll’s decision to open the bill to amendment has signaled a potential shift in the government’s approach to the contentious policy, as the new premier works to balance the expectations of working Victorians and the business community ahead of the upcoming election.

  • Meet the astronomer digging into the Milky Way’s ‘fossils’

    Meet the astronomer digging into the Milky Way’s ‘fossils’

    For decades, Argentine-born astronomer Amina Helmi has dedicated her career to unearthing the hidden origins of the Milky Way, treating ancient stars as cosmic time capsules that hold the keys to our galaxy’s chaotic birth. Now, her groundbreaking work rewriting long-held theories of galactic formation has earned her one of the highest honors in the field: the prestigious Kavli Prize, often referred to as the Nobel Prize of astrophysics.

    At 55, Helmi is a professor at the University of Groningen in the northern Netherlands, where her passion for the Milky Way is impossible to miss in her compact office. Family snapshots and towering stacks of dense, jargon-heavy academic dissertations share space with a bowl overflowing with Milky Way chocolate bars – a playful, sweet nod to the star system that has consumed her professional life.

    Helmi is a pioneer in galactic archaeology, a specialized subfield that treats stars as “cosmic fossils” to reconstruct the Milky Way’s ancient history and project its long-term trajectory. Unlike the popular image of astronomers hunched over telescopes scanning the night sky, Helmi’s work centers on parsing enormous astronomical datasets, some of which contain more than two billion lines of stellar data.

    “Stars carry chemical fingerprints that act just like DNA,” Helmi explained in an exclusive interview with AFP. “These chemical compositions preserve irreplaceable information about where a star formed and what environment it originated in, letting us trace billions of years of galactic history.”

    A transformative turning point for Helmi’s research came from the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission, an ambitious project to map the Milky Way in three dimensions, to which Helmi herself contributed. “Gaia measured the motion of nearly 1.5 billion stars across a far larger volume of space than any previous mission,” she noted. “It wasn’t just the sheer number of stars we were able to track – it was the unprecedented accuracy of those motion measurements that changed everything for our field.”

    Armed with Gaia’s unprecedented dataset, Helmi and her collaborators pieced together a cataclysmic event that reshaped the Milky Way forever some 10 billion years ago – hundreds of millions of years before our own Sun formed. At that time, a small dwarf galaxy named Gaia-Enceladus collided and merged with the young proto-Milky Way. The leftover stars from the crashed dwarf now form the diffuse halo that wraps around our galaxy, and the collision triggered a wave of new star formation that created the Milky Way’s signature “puffed up” galactic disk.

    This discovery upended the long-standing scientific consensus that the Milky Way formed through slow, steady, continuous growth. Instead, Helmi’s work confirmed that our galaxy assembled itself incrementally through a series of violent collisions and mergers with smaller cosmic bodies, a process called hierarchical accretion.

    Helmi shares the 2024 Kavli Prize in Astrophysics with two fellow researchers: Vasily Belokurov of the University of Cambridge and Rodrigo Ibata of the University of Strasbourg. The three scientists will split the $1 million prize fund, receive a gold medal, and be honored at a formal ceremony hosted by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters in Oslo this coming September. The award committee recognized the trio for “uncovering the fossil evidence of past mergers proving that the Milky Way galaxy was built through hierarchical accretion.”

    Helmi told AFP she was completely stunned when she received the news of the award. “I was totally speechless. To me, this is the biggest honor there is in our field – it’s just absolutely unbelievable,” she said. “This is also wonderful recognition for galactic archaeology as a whole. It’s a relatively young field, but it’s exploded in growth over the last decade, and this award puts that work on the map.”

    Looking ahead, Helmi plans to continue diving into new data releases from the Gaia mission, while developing more robust statistical models to process the field’s increasingly massive datasets. When asked what the Milky Way’s violent youth means for its future, she offered a reassuring take: “Nothing major has happened to our galaxy since that early collision. You could say it had a wild, turbulent youth, and now it’s enjoying a quiet, restful adulthood.”

  • US immigration agents are patrolling airports to arrest visa overstayers

    US immigration agents are patrolling airports to arrest visa overstayers

    U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has launched a new enforcement operation that places agents on patrol at domestic airports across the country, targeting and arresting individuals who have overstayed their valid entry visas, ABC News confirmed in a report published Tuesday.

    For non-citizens who entered the United States through legal channels, overstaying a visa is traditionally classified as a civil violation rather than a criminal offense. Many of these individuals are caught in bureaucratic limbo: their applications for permanent resident green cards remain pending long after their initial visas expire, leaving them in unauthorized status through no fault of their own.

    According to ABC News’ reporting, at least 27 visa overstayers have been taken into custody across nine states since the airport patrol program launched. To identify targets, ICE accesses passenger travel data collected by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), which screens every passenger booked on both domestic and international flights departing from U.S. airports.

    In an official statement, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the federal agency that oversees ICE, claimed that visa overstayers should only use U.S. airports to facilitate “self-deportation” rather than general domestic travel.

    The expanded airport operation is part of the broader agenda of the second Trump administration, led by new DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin. The administration has made meeting former President Trump’s campaign pledge of one million annual deportations of people it labels as “illegal immigrants” — including both unauthorized border crossers and visa overstayers — a top policy priority.

    While many people in immigration limbo entered the U.S. to seek asylum, the administration has effectively closed off nearly all access to this legal protection pathway in recent months. Data from ICE confirms that enforcement activity has surged sharply: last month marked the highest number of new bookings into ICE immigration detention facilities since Trump took office in January 2025. More than 43,000 people were taken into custody to await deportation in June, averaging 1,500 arrests per day across the country.

    Though DHS officially denies the existence of a mandatory arrest quota, off-the-record conversations between agents overheard by third parties reveal that ICE staff are promised financial bonuses for exceeding arrest targets. This new airport patrol operation follows the administration’s earlier controversial large-scale enforcement campaign, Operation Metro Surge, in Minneapolis, which ended earlier this year after widespread condemnation over violent tactics. ICE’s approach to street arrests has remained largely unchanged, however: earlier this month, ICE agents fatally shot two unarmed people in Texas and Maine, neither of whom had any prior criminal record.

    Widespread accounts from detainees and viral social media footage have documented that plainclothes ICE agents often cover their faces and identifiers during arrests, leading targets to believe they are victims of kidnapping when agents tackle them mid-activity, whether they are working, shopping, or walking down a public street. Footage of hundreds of these incidents sparked national outrage across the U.S. last year, and that public backlash appears to have shifted public opinion on immigration policy.

    New data from a Gallup poll conducted earlier this month shows a dramatic reversal of long-standing public attitudes. In 2024, the year Trump was re-elected, 55 percent of U.S. adults said they supported reducing overall immigration levels. Today, that number has dropped to just 30 percent. This shift ends a four-year trend of growing support for stricter immigration limits. Currently, nearly 80 percent of Americans — a record high in polling history — say they believe immigration is a net positive for the country.

    A core component of the Trump administration’s new immigration policy is the elimination of Temporary Protected Status (TPS), a program that allows hundreds of thousands of people from crisis-stricken countries to live and work legally in the U.S. while conditions in their home countries are too dangerous for safe return. TPS is approved in 18-month increments with no statutory cap on total extensions, and allows recipients to obtain formal work authorization during their designation.

    To date, the administration has revoked TPS designations for eight countries: Myanmar, Venezuela, Honduras, Nepal, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, and Cameroon. The existing TPS designations for Haiti and Syria are scheduled to expire this week, meaning more than 350,000 Haitian TPS holders — most of whom have lived in the U.S. since 2010 — and roughly 6,000 Syrian TPS holders, who received designation in 2011, will now become eligible for arrest and detention by ICE.

    “Enforcement will be carried out,” DHS warned in a post on the social media platform X, urging affected people to either coordinate voluntary departure through the CBP Home digital portal or wait for official deportation. The agency has offered up to $2,500 in travel reimbursements for people who arrange their own departure through the app, though there is no public record of any individual actually receiving the promised funds to date.

  • Singapore fines French teen $465 for viral straw-licking stunt

    Singapore fines French teen $465 for viral straw-licking stunt

    A 19-year-old French student studying in Singapore has been ordered to pay a S$600 fine (equivalent to approximately US$465 and £348) after pleading guilty to a public nuisance charge over a reckless social media stunt that sparked widespread public anger. Didier Gaspard Owen Maximilien committed the act back on March 12 at an iJooz vending machine located in Goldhill Centre, an upscale neighborhood in Singapore, shortly after finishing a boxing training session, according to reporting from Channel News Asia.

    Following the incident, Maximilien uploaded a video of himself licking an unused straw taken from the vending machine’s dispenser before placing it back with the rest of the straws. He captioned the post “city is not safe”, which quickly spread beyond his original followers after being reposted to a local community page and picked up by mainstream Singaporean news outlets. Thousands of social media users expressed sharp disgust at the irresponsible act, which put hundreds of other consumers at potential risk of exposure to germs and illness.

    In response to the incident, iJooz — the company that operates the popular vending machine chain, which sells freshly squeezed orange juice for S$2 per cup and has machines placed across Singapore in shopping districts, train terminals, and public housing estates — took immediate precautionary action. The firm replaced all 500 straws stored in the affected machine’s dispenser to eliminate any public health risk.

    Under Singaporean law, convictions for public nuisance carry a maximum penalty of up to S$2,000 in fines, three months of imprisonment, or both. In this case, both prosecution and defense legal teams agreed that a fine was the appropriate sentencing for the first-time offender. Speaking on behalf of her client, Maximilien’s defense lawyer told The Straits Times that the student has expressed deep regret for his actions. “He is truly sorry for having caused all this trouble,” the lawyer stated, adding that Maximilien now recognizes what he initially thought was a harmless prank has turned into a serious incident with far-reaching consequences.

    The case has reignited public conversation in Singapore about social media stunts, personal responsibility, and the potential for reckless acts to create unnecessary harm and disruption for the wider community.

  • Recovery operations continue in Kumamoto after quake

    Recovery operations continue in Kumamoto after quake

    Days after a powerful earthquake shook southwestern Japan’s Kumamoto region, recovery and cleanup operations are still ongoing as local authorities and private stakeholders work to assess full damage and restore normalcy to affected communities. Among the hardest-hit sites are two major local economic hubs: the popular Aeon shopping mall and a large production facility operated by Nippon Paper Industries. Both locations have been confirmed to have sustained substantial structural damage that has disrupted operations and displaced workers and shoppers. While full damage assessments are still being compiled, early reports indicate that the impact to both properties will require significant repair work before they can reopen to the public and resume regular operations. Local emergency management teams have prioritized clearing debris from affected areas, inspecting adjacent infrastructure for safety, and supporting businesses as they navigate the path to recovery. The earthquake, which struck without warning, has underscored the ongoing seismic risk that Japan faces, and has prompted renewed calls for updated infrastructure resilience plans across high-risk regions. As recovery work continues, residents and business owners are working alongside emergency crews to rebuild what was damaged, with many hoping for a swift return to daily life.

  • South Korea’s women web sleuths fight AI deepfake porn

    South Korea’s women web sleuths fight AI deepfake porn

    As a global leader in advanced technology manufacturing, South Korea has built its international reputation on cutting-edge innovation in smartphones and semiconductor production. But behind this widely celebrated tech success story lies a devastating underbelly: a growing epidemic of digital sexual violence against women, with AI-generated deepfake pornography emerging as the newest and fastest-spreading threat. Today, a team of dedicated women digital investigators are on the front lines of this fight, working tirelessly to remove illegal non-consensual content from the internet and support survivors of this abuse.

    Based in a sunlit Seoul office, the National Center for Digital Sexual Crime Response employs 23 trained specialists who scour the web to identify exploitative deepfake content, spycam footage, and non-consensually shared intimate imagery, then file formal removal requests backed by the threat of legal prosecution. Founded in 2018 in response to mass anti-spycam protests that drew tens of thousands of women demanding government action, the center expanded to 17 regional branches, offering additional support including legal guidance, emotional counseling, and evidence collection for criminal prosecutions.

    In 2023 alone, the organization removed more than 318,000 pieces of illegal exploitative content on behalf of 10,600 survivors, 75% of whom are women and girls. Center director Kim Mi-soon told AFP that South Korea’s faster policy response compared to other nations stems from two key factors: digital sex crimes became widespread earlier here, and South Korean women mobilized quickly and forcefully to demand change.

    For survivors, the center’s support has been life-changing. A 33-year-old military service member, who requested to be identified only by her surname Kim, said deepfakes of her were shared on encrypted messaging apps that were initially outside the center’s reach. Even so, she said the center’s help made an enormous difference for someone navigating abuse alone. The organization provided financial assistance to obtain a formal trauma diagnosis for court proceedings, a support that left her feeling validated and relieved. “Navigating the whole legal procedure alone while suffering trauma would have been impossible,” she explained.

    The threat of digital sexual violence has evolved rapidly over the past five years. The 2020 “Nth Room” scandal shocked the nation when it was revealed that hundreds of men were exploiting dozens of women and girls in paid “sextortion” chatrooms, where victims were coerced into producing extreme explicit content. After that crackdown, sexual deepfakes emerged as the dominant new threat. Global data from web safety firm Security Hero shows that circulation of deepfake content surged 550% between 2019 and 2023, with nearly 98% of all deepfake content being non-consensual pornography of women, and more than half of all global victims located in South Korea.

    While high-profile K-pop idols have been among the most high-profile targets, police data shows digital sex crimes now account for 40% of all sexual offenses in the country, and ordinary women are increasingly targeted. Deletion specialist Kim Yun-hee noted that the trend has shifted sharply: “Since last year, we’ve seen more and more deepfakes of ordinary women and girls — with the images becoming way more sophisticated than before and victims getting younger and younger.” To keep pace, the center has developed its own AI tools, including a continuous monitoring system that can detect exploitative material and grooming messages targeting children.

    For the specialists who do this emotionally heavy work, the impact makes the effort worthwhile. “This job is not easy,” 31-year-old Kim Yun-hee said. “But it feels really rewarding whenever our clients say our service is a true life-saver.”

    South Korea has implemented strict legal penalties to curb the crisis: deepfake pornography is explicitly illegal, with creators facing up to seven years in prison and even possessors can be sentenced to up to three years behind bars. Penalties were strengthened in 2024, after a major scandal uncovered a network of Telegram chatrooms where users shared deepfakes of female classmates, colleagues, acquaintances, and relatives, often made by stealing photos from victims’ public social media profiles.

    International experts say South Korea’s holistic response has positioned it as a global leader in addressing this emerging harm. Clare McGlynn, a law professor at Durham University in the UK and a leading expert on image-based sexual abuse, called South Korea’s approach a model for the rest of the world, noting that it “is leading the way on providing holistic support services and investing in the latest technology to try to reduce the harm.”

    Even with these advances, campaigners warn that technical and legal responses alone cannot solve the crisis. Activists point to patriarchal cultural norms that frame women as sexual objects without inherent dignity as the root cause of the epidemic. Kim Yeo-jin, head of the nonprofit Korea Cyber Sexual Violence Response Center, argues that online harm requires offline change. “Unless we tackle this fundamental cause by fostering more gender equality in wider society and strengthening gender equality education at school, no amount of removal efforts will be enough,” she said.

  • Hope dwindles for rescue in southwestern Japan quake as death toll climbs to 23

    Hope dwindles for rescue in southwestern Japan quake as death toll climbs to 23

    Two full days after a devastating magnitude 7.1 earthquake tore through rural communities on Japan’s Kyushu Island, rescuers are locked in a race against the clock to locate trapped survivors, as the official death toll from the disaster rose to at least 23 by Thursday. The powerful tremor, which struck Tuesday afternoon in Kumamoto Prefecture, triggered a string of catastrophic secondary damage: it sparked an explosion at a crowded regional shopping mall, toppled a factory chimney, and reduced hundreds of residential structures to rubble, leaving dozens injured and hundreds unaccounted for. The Kumamoto prefectural government confirmed that at least 63 people sustained injuries in the quake, five of whom are in critical condition, though the full number of people missing across the affected region has not yet been confirmed. For those who escaped the initial collapse of their homes, the immediate aftermath was marked by frantic efforts: many survivors described returning to flattened properties to dig through debris with their bare hands to pull trapped family members out, with dozens rushed to area hospitals for emergency treatment. Thousands of displaced residents have been forced to seek emergency shelter in large public facilities including community gymnasiums across the region, with many spending a second frigid night away from their homes on Wednesday. Many properties remain cut off from running water and power, while even homeowners with structurally intact homes say they are too afraid of aftershocks to return to their properties. Japan is globally recognized for its strict, earthquake-resistant building codes, developed in response to the country’s frequent seismic activity, but the affected region is home to a large number of older traditional Japanese homes, which lack the modern reinforcement needed to withstand powerful tremors, leaving them disproportionately vulnerable to collapse. The worst single loss of life occurred at the Aeon Mall in Kashima Town, a popular retail hub that was packed with thousands of shoppers when the quake hit in the late afternoon. Company officials confirmed that roughly 3,000 customers were successfully evacuated to an open parking lot before an explosion struck a less crowded section of the mall where maintenance and retail staff were still working. The quake caused the mall’s second floor to cave in, trapping multiple people who had not yet exited the building. Kumamoto local authorities confirmed that as of early Thursday, six of the 11 people pulled from the mall’s wreckage have been declared dead. In sweltering, humid conditions, anxious family members of people still unaccounted for have gathered near the ruined mall, wandering the perimeter waiting for updates on their loved ones with little information to go on. Another major disaster unfolded at a Nippon Paper Industries factory in Yatsushiro, where a large factory chimney toppled during the tremor. Disaster response teams confirmed that 10 workers were pulled from the rubble alive, but eight workers were killed, and one remains missing. As of Thursday, more than 22,800 homes across the prefecture remain without power, and more than 10,000 people are sheltering in roughly 400 emergency evacuation centers. Response teams have been working to install additional power capacity at the shelters to run air conditioning, as residents cope with unseasonably hot weather in the aftermath of the disaster. Associated Press writer Yuri Kageyama contributed reporting from Tokyo, Japan.

  • Fauci to face contempt vote after refusing to answer Covid questions in Congress

    Fauci to face contempt vote after refusing to answer Covid questions in Congress

    A high-stakes, confrontational Senate hearing focused on former White House chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic has erupted into a major political and legal firestorm, after the nation’s one-time top infectious disease expert declined to answer more than 100 questions by invoking his U.S. Constitutional Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

    The hearing, led by Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Rand Paul, a Republican from Kentucky, ended with Paul issuing a stark warning: Fauci faces a very real possibility of criminal prosecution for his refusal to testify. Paul, who has spent years leveling accusations that Fauci covered up COVID-19’s origins and improperly funded gain-of-function research at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology, confirmed the committee will hold a vote next week on a resolution to hold Fauci in criminal contempt of Congress. If the committee approves the measure, it will move to the full Senate for a vote, where supporters would need 60 votes to advance — a steep hurdle that would require bipartisan support from Democratic lawmakers, a outcome widely seen as a longshot. Should the resolution pass the Senate, it would be referred to the District of Columbia’s top federal prosecutor for potential criminal proceedings.

    Fauci, who previously led the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, told the committee he was acting on the explicit advice of his legal counsel when he invoked the Fifth Amendment. Legal experts note that invoking this constitutional protection is not an admission of guilt, and is a standard practice used by individuals across all tiers of U.S. legal proceedings, even in non-criminal investigations. Notably, former President and current White House occupant Donald Trump himself invoked the Fifth Amendment dozens of times during a 2022 civil deposition connected to investigations into his business, the Trump Organization.

    A key complicating factor in any potential prosecution is the pre-emptive pardon former President Joe Biden granted Fauci before leaving office, covering all federal crimes Fauci may have committed between 2014 and 2025. Even so, legal questions remain unresolved: the pardon does not cover actions after 2025, including Fauci’s refusal to comply with Wednesday’s hearing, and presidential pardons only apply to federal offenses, not state-level investigations. Paul acknowledged the unclear scope of the pardon, saying the question of whether it grants Fauci immunity from current proceedings is a legal issue that may ultimately need to be settled by the courts. Already, Florida’s top attorney James Uthmeier has announced his office will launch an investigation into Fauci, though he has yet to release specific details about the alleged misconduct under review.

    Paul’s allegations against Fauci center on longstanding claims that COVID-19 leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a theory that received CIA backing last year. During Wednesday’s hearing, Paul pointed to a discrepancy between Fauci’s public statements and private writings: while Fauci publicly supported the theory that the virus originated naturally via animal-to-human spillover, his personal diaries suggest he privately believed the virus emerged from a laboratory accident. Committee Republicans also questioned Fauci on the shifting COVID-19 public health guidance rolled out during the pandemic, changes that public health officials have long defended as necessary adjustments as new scientific information about the virus emerged. Fauci has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing connected to pandemic response or coronavirus research funding.

    The hearing quickly split along partisan lines, with multiple Democratic lawmakers rushing to Fauci’s defense. Senator Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire called the proceeding a deliberate political stunt designed to entrap Fauci. Former President Trump, who has clashed repeatedly with Fauci even as he awarded the former official a presidential commendation for work on the Operation Warp Speed vaccine program in 2021, also waded into the controversy on social media, labeling Fauci “crazy” and claiming Fauci had long intentionally lied about the virus’s origins to protect China.

    The global scientific community remains divided on COVID-19’s origins. The World Health Organization confirmed last year that the natural spillover theory remains the best supported by current available evidence, but added that the question remains inconclusive until additional data is uncovered. For Fauci personally, the hearing marks the latest escalation of years of targeted political attacks: the former official has received hundreds of death threats during and after the pandemic, and Trump last year ordered the removal of the federal security detail assigned to protect him.

    As the country awaits next week’s contempt vote, legal and political observers note that the outcome remains highly uncertain, with the pardon, partisan split in the Senate, and unclear jurisdiction over potential charges all creating major barriers to any formal prosecution.

  • Tickets for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey cancelled by IMAX after reseller discovery

    Tickets for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey cancelled by IMAX after reseller discovery

    When Christopher Nolan’s latest blockbuster *The Odyssey* landed in cinemas, it sparked unprecedented demand for a very special screening experience that can only be found one place in the entire Southern Hemisphere: IMAX Melbourne, the only venue down under equipped to project the film on pristine 70mm IMAX film. That exclusive access has turned into a ticket frenzy, with fans traveling from as far as Europe just to secure a seat at the iconic venue, and has now led to a major crackdown on unauthorized ticket scalping that has left hundreds of resold tickets void.

    The saga began earlier this week, when a Reddit user sparked widespread joking and frustration by posting a screenshot of a massive Facebook resale listing, quipping that Melbourne IMAX had effectively “outsourced ticket sales to a fella on FB.” The listing revealed a staggering cache of almost 100 tickets for September screenings, including blocks of two, four, and six seats, and an eye-popping 88 seats reserved for the 1:50 pm showing on Monday, September 14 – nearly an entire auditorium held by resellers looking to flip tickets at marked-up prices.

    Unlike standard film releases, IMAX Melbourne classifies these 70mm *The Odyssey* screenings as special limited events, with no discount vouchers accepted for entry. Tickets are priced as high as $70 per seat, and the venue has already sold more than 88,000 tickets across the run, racking up over $3.95 million in gross box office revenue. Every single screening through September 23 is currently sold out, a level of demand that has created the perfect conditions for scalpers to attempt to profit off desperate fans who missed out on official sales.

    After the viral Reddit post brought the large-scale unauthorized resale operation to the venue’s attention, IMAX Melbourne moved quickly to shut down the scheme. In an official update posted to Instagram, the cinema confirmed that all tickets purchased through third-party platforms are invalid, have been canceled, and will be considered fake on the day of the screening. “All tickets sold on third-party websites have been cancelled or are fake tickets and are not valid for any session,” the statement read.

    The extreme difficulty of securing official tickets has already drawn comparisons to some of the most competitive live event sales in recent memory, with one commenter online noting, “Why was it easier to get Eras tour tickets than it was to get tickets to this movie?” For now, the venue’s crackdown has blocked the scalpers’ profit scheme, though the intense demand for the exclusive 70mm screening experience leaves many fans still waiting for a chance to see Nolan’s blockbuster on the format it was made for.