Global Pulse

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  • Doubt cast over One Nation seat as ‘absent votes’ found

    Doubt cast over One Nation seat as ‘absent votes’ found

    A razor-thin election victory for Australia’s One Nation party in the state of South Australia has been thrown into uncertainty after election officials uncovered dozens of overlooked ballots that could overturn the initial result.

    Chantelle Thomas, running on behalf of Pauline Hanson’s right-wing populist party, was officially declared the winner of the regional Narungga seat in last month’s state election, holding a wafer-thin 58-vote advantage over her closest competitor, Liberal Party candidate Tania Stock. That narrow margin, the smallest of any contest across the entire election, meant Thomas’s victory was not finalized until April 2, nearly two full weeks after polling closed on March 21. The Narungga electorate covers most of South Australia’s rural Yorke Peninsula region.

    The entire outcome was upended this week when election administrators discovered 77 uncounted absent ballots that had not been included in the original final tally. Critically, the number of uncounted votes exceeds Thomas’s winning majority by 19 votes, opening the door for the result to be reversed.

    On Thursday, the Electoral Commission of South Australia officially notified all competing candidates of the discovery and ordered a full recount scheduled for Friday April 17. “Following the discovery of votes that have not been counted, I have secured the unopened ballot papers and have ordered a further count for the district of Narungga,” explained Leah McLay, the commission’s acting commissioner. “I have informed all candidates and will oversee the count on Friday, April 17 and nominated scrutineers are invited to attend.”

    Reaction to the administrative blunder has been sharp, with One Nation’s South Australian leader Cory Bernardi launching a scathing attack on the electoral commission’s competence. “How can we rely on the integrity of what has transpired?” Bernardi told local outlet The Advertiser. “Now there’s plenty of questions to be asked and I think the answers need to be forthcoming, but this is very shaky territory for democracy right now.”

    For the opposition Liberal Party, leadership has called for rapid transparency from election officials to clear up widespread public confusion. “Who knows what this will mean for the seat of Narungga, but that’s why I think the electoral commission needs to provide some clarity to people quickly,” said Ashton Hurn, leader of the South Australian Liberals, in comments to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Stock, the Liberal candidate who placed second in the original count, told reporters she had not yet been contacted by the commission and was unaware of the planned recount when approached for comment.

    All parties and local voters are now bracing for an anxious 24 hours as the recount gets underway, with the final result of the closely contested seat hanging in the balance. The unforeseen error has sparked broader questions about the integrity of South Australia’s election administration, even as officials move quickly to correct the mistake and confirm a definitive final result.

  • LIV Golf reassures players over Saudi withdrawal rumors

    LIV Golf reassures players over Saudi withdrawal rumors

    As swirling rumors of imminent Saudi Arabian funding withdrawal sparked fears of an imminent collapse for the breakaway LIV Golf tour, league executives moved swiftly this Wednesday to reassure players and staff that operations and funding remain fully intact. The Saudi-backed circuit has roiled global men’s professional golf since its controversial 2022 launch, when it lured dozens of the sport’s top stars away from the established PGA Tour and DP World Tour with nine-figure guaranteed contracts that split the golf community.

    Over the past week, speculation has grown that Saudi Arabia’s deep-pocketed backers, the Public Investment Fund (PIF), the kingdom’s $1 trillion sovereign wealth fund, have grown weary of the high-cost venture. To date, the project is estimated to have cost PIF more than $5 billion, with no path to near-term profitability. Multiple major outlets including the *Financial Times*, *New York Times*, and *Wall Street Journal* all reported this Wednesday, citing unnamed anonymous sources, that PIF’s exit from the tour was imminent.

    But in an internal email to all players and staff obtained by Agence France-Presse, LIV Golf CEO Scott O’Neil sought to quash the uncertainty. “I want to be crystal clear: Our season continues exactly as planned, uninterrupted and at full throttle,” O’Neil wrote. The executive’s statement came as players gathered in Mexico City ahead of the tour’s upcoming event at Club de Golf Chapultepec, where organizers have doubled down on maintaining a business-as-usual posture. Tour officials published first-round tee times on schedule as planned, and even leaned into humor to address the speculation on social media. “Slow news day? We are ON,” read one social post, paired with a graphic reading “BREAKING NEWS. TUNE IN TOMORROW” alongside the tournament’s full starting schedule.

    Unnamed sources close to LIV Golf’s operations also pushed back on the exit rumors to AFP, noting that the tour projects its revenue will double between 2024 and 2025, and pointing to record-breaking spectator turnouts at recent events held in Australia and South Africa. Still, questions remain: the *Telegraph* of London reported that top LIV Golf executives were summoned to a New York meeting this week to discuss contingency plans for a potential PIF withdrawal.

    The speculation comes on the same day PIF unveiled a new five-year strategic plan that will restructure the fund’s global investment portfolio, an announcement that comes against a backdrop of rising geopolitical instability across the Middle East. The region has faced escalating security risks following a wave of Iranian strikes on military, energy, and transportation infrastructure that came after a joint U.S.-Israeli strike on Iranian targets in late February. Even before the current outbreak of conflict, Saudi Arabia’s domestic economic reform agenda faced pressure, as years of sustained low global oil prices have cut into government revenues.

    Signs of internal instability have already emerged on LIV Golf’s player roster. Two high-profile golfers, five-time major champion Brooks Koepka and 2018 Masters winner Patrick Reed, have recently left the breakaway tour to secure a return to the PGA Tour. For the hundreds of remaining players still under LIV contract, the full implications of a potential PIF exit remain unclear. Speaking to reporters in Mexico City, LIV veteran and 2017 Masters champion Sergio Garcia noted that players have received no official communication of any funding shift. “We haven’t heard anything” since the start of the year, Garcia said, when PIF governor Yasir al-Rumayyan reassured golfers that the fund remained committed to the circuit as a long-term project.

    In his Wednesday email, O’Neil did not directly refute the claims of an impending Saudi withdrawal, instead framing the current speculation as a growing pain common to new disruptive ventures. “The life of a startup movement is often defined by these moments of pressure,” he wrote. “We signed up for this because we believe in disrupting the status quo. We are pioneers, and while the road isn’t always smooth, the destination is worth every mile.”

  • Much-hyped Alzheimer’s drugs do not help patients, review finds

    Much-hyped Alzheimer’s drugs do not help patients, review finds

    For decades, the global medical community has pinned its hopes on the amyloid hypothesis as the foundation for breakthrough treatments for Alzheimer’s disease, the progressive neurodegenerative condition that impacts millions of older adults worldwide. On Thursday, a gold-standard systematic review upended that long-held consensus, concluding that the much-touted class of anti-amyloid Alzheimer’s medications fails to deliver meaningful clinical benefits to patients – a finding that has already sparked fierce debate across the neuroscience and pharmaceutical sectors.

    The analysis was conducted by the Cochrane Collaboration, an independent research organization widely recognized as the global gold standard for evidence-based synthesis of existing clinical data. The review focused on the entire class of drugs designed to target and clear amyloid beta plaques, the sticky protein clumps that accumulate in the brains of people living with Alzheimer’s, a hallmark of the disease that researchers have long theorized is its root cause.

    After decades of expensive high-stakes research that yielded little progress, two newer anti-amyloid medications – lecanemab (marketed as Leqembi, developed by Biogen and Eisai) and donanemab (sold as Kisunla by U.S. pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly) – were celebrated as transformative gamechangers when they debuted. Both secured regulatory approval from the United States Food and Drug Administration and the European Union within the last three years, bringing new hope to patients and their families grappling with the currently untreatable condition.

    Even before the review was published, however, growing concerns about the drugs’ real-world effectiveness, exorbitant pricing, and dangerous side effects – including elevated risks of brain swelling and cerebral bleeding – had led to widespread caution. In the United Kingdom and France, for example, national public health systems have already declined to cover the treatments for most patients.

    To conduct the most comprehensive analysis to date of this drug class, Cochrane researchers aggregated pooled data from 17 separate clinical trials involving more than 20,000 total participants, all of whom had either mild cognitive impairment or early-stage Alzheimer’s dementia. Across an 18-month average follow-up period, the trials evaluated seven distinct anti-amyloid drugs, with one trial focused on donanemab and another examining lecanemab.

    While the drugs did successfully reduce amyloid plaque buildup in patients’ brains, as confirmed by brain imaging, that biological change did not translate into tangible, clinically meaningful improvements for patients, lead study author Francesco Nonino from Italy’s IRCCS Institute told reporters during a press briefing. “Even though early smaller trials reported statistically significant changes in disease progression markers, that improvement does not add up to a noticeable benefit for people living with Alzheimer’s,” Nonino explained.

    Co-author Edo Richard, a neurologist at Radboud University Medical Center in the Netherlands, emphasized that the study’s findings directly challenge decades of core thinking in Alzheimer’s research. “The long-held hypothesis that removing amyloid plaques will improve patient outcomes is refuted by our results,” he said, adding that he hopes the findings will redirect research funding toward other potential biological mechanisms driving Alzheimer’s, which could yield more effective treatments down the line. “The current generation of these drugs is simply not delivering on the transformative promise that has been used to promote them,” Richard added.

    Not all leading experts agree with the review’s conclusions, however. John Hardy, the British biologist who first proposed the amyloid hypothesis back in the 1990s, issued a scathing rebuke of the work. Hardy, who disclosed he has worked as a paid consultant for Eli Lilly, Biogen, and Eisai, argued that the review’s methodology was fatally flawed: it pooled data from the newer, more promising lecanemab and donanemab alongside older anti-amyloid drugs that were already known to be ineffective, dragging down the overall average of measured benefit. “This is a silly paper which should not have been published,” Hardy told AFP in an interview.

    In response to the criticism, Richard defended the review’s approach, noting that while the included drugs may use slightly different mechanisms to attack amyloid, they all share the same core target: amyloid beta proteins, so grouping them for analysis is methodologically sound.

    Other independent experts have struck a more moderate middle ground. Bryce Vissel, an Australian neuroscientist who was not affiliated with the research, noted that the review does not definitively prove that amyloid plays no role in Alzheimer’s development, nor does it rule out the possibility that future, improved amyloid-targeted therapies could one day help patients. Even so, Vissel acknowledged that the analysis delivers a clear, sobering conclusion: the current generation of widely hyped anti-amyloid drugs has not lived up to the lofty expectations that surrounded their arrival to the market.

  • China raises pressure on underground Catholics to join official church, Human Rights Watch finds

    China raises pressure on underground Catholics to join official church, Human Rights Watch finds

    In a detailed new report released Wednesday, New York-based international rights organization Human Rights Watch has documented a sharp escalation in pressure from Chinese authorities on underground Catholic communities to align with the state-controlled official church, alongside expanded surveillance and movement restrictions targeting China’s estimated 12 million Catholic believers. The report frames the intensifying crackdown as an extension of a 10-year government campaign designed to enforce the loyalty of all religious groups and independent religious communities to the officially atheist Chinese Communist Party.

    For decades, China’s Catholic population has been split along two distinct paths: the state-sanctioned Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association, which does not recognize the Vatican’s papal authority, and an underground network of congregations that have maintained unbroken loyalty to Rome even amid sustained persecution. In 2018, Pope Francis brokered a landmark agreement with Beijing aimed at easing decades of bilateral tensions between the Vatican and China. Under the terms of the deal—whose full text has never been disclosed to the public—Beijing puts forward candidates for bishop positions, while the Pope retains the power to veto unacceptable nominees, a departure from centuries of tradition that gave the Vatican exclusive control over bishop appointments.

    Despite the 2018 accord, Human Rights Watch senior China researcher Yalkun Uluyol emphasized that Catholics across China continue to face mounting repression that systematically violates their fundamental right to religious freedom. The organization is calling on Pope Leo XIV, who assumed the papacy last year, to launch an urgent full review of the agreement and pressure Beijing to end ongoing persecution and intimidation targeting underground clergy, church leaders and ordinary worshippers.

    Since the 2018 deal was signed, Human Rights Watch found, Chinese authorities have used a range of coercive tactics to force underground Catholic communities into joining the state-controlled Patriotic Association. These tactics include arbitrary detention, enforced disappearances, and long-term house arrest targeting underground Catholic bishops and priests. The report also notes that ideological control and digital surveillance have been tightened within the official state-approved church, alongside new restrictions on religious activities and foreign connections. A regulatory change adopted last December now requires all Catholic clergy to obtain explicit state approval before traveling abroad.

    Because Human Rights Watch researchers are barred from entering mainland China, the organization based its findings on firsthand accounts from individuals with direct knowledge of Catholic life inside China who now reside outside the country, as well as input from leading experts on religious freedom and Chinese Catholicism. Specific testimonies included in the report are attributed to anonymous sources who left China to avoid government retaliation.

    Pope Leo made his first appointment of a Chinese bishop under the 2018 agreement just one month after taking office last year, and in subsequent public comments, he confirmed he would maintain the agreement “in the short term.” “I’m also in ongoing dialogue with a number of people, Chinese, on both sides of some of the issues that are there,” Leo stated in an interview. “It’s a very difficult situation. In the long term, I don’t pretend to say this is what I will and will not do, but after two months, I’ve already begun having discussions at several levels on that topic.” As of Wednesday, Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni had not issued any immediate response to requests for comment on the Human Rights Watch report, and China’s Foreign Ministry also declined to immediately answer queries from the Associated Press on the findings.

    The broader crackdown on Catholic communities is part of a larger national policy launched by Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2016, centered on the “Sinicization” of all religion. The policy seeks to expand state oversight and ideological control to bring all religious practice into alignment with Communist Party ideology and leadership. Under this campaign, Human Rights Watch found, authorities have demolished hundreds of church buildings and crosses, banned gatherings at unregistered unofficial churches, restricted access to religious texts including the Bible, and seized unauthorized religious materials. The Sinicization drive has already led to severe repression of other religious communities, including Tibetan Buddhism and Uyghur Islam, according to the report.

    The escalating pressure on independent religious groups extends beyond Catholic communities. Last October, Pastor Ezra Jin Mingri, leader of one of China’s largest unregistered underground Protestant congregations, Zion Church, was detained at his home in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, alongside dozens of other unregistered church leaders across the country, according to his family and China-based religious monitoring groups. In April, U.S.-based religious freedom advocacy group ChinaAid called on former U.S. President Donald Trump to demand Jin’s release during a planned scheduled meeting with Xi Jinping in May. Bob Fu, president of ChinaAid, argued that the Chinese Communist Party has accelerated its systematic campaign to eliminate independent religious life entirely, and called on the U.S. government to impose tangible consequences rather than only issuing expressions of concern.

  • Albanese government considering exempting new houses from capital gains reform

    Albanese government considering exempting new houses from capital gains reform

    As Australia’s Albanese government prepares for its upcoming May federal budget, a key policy debate over capital gains tax (CGT) reform has moved to the forefront, with new residential properties emerging as a potential candidate for exemption from planned cuts to the controversial CGT discount.

    CGT is a levy applied to profits earned from the sale of assets including stocks and real estate, which is counted toward a taxpayer’s annual income. Current rules grant a 50% discount on capital gains for assets held longer than 12 months, with an automatic full exemption for an individual’s primary place of residence.

    Ahead of potential changes expected to be outlined in the budget, the Business Council of Australia (BCA) has formally called on the government to carve out an exception for newly built dwellings if it proceeds with rolling back the existing 50% CGT discount. BCA chief executive Bran Black argued that any adjustment to the CGT discount must be structured to avoid discouraging critical investment in new housing supply, a core priority of the current government’s economic agenda. Black also pushed back against any retrospective application of CGT changes, noting that any alterations to the tax code are best implemented as part of a broader, comprehensive tax reform effort rather than isolated adjustments.

    Prime Minister Anthony Albanese this week confirmed to Nine Entertainment publications that the government is exploring policy changes that go beyond simply increasing overall housing supply, amid ongoing political pressure to address rising wealth inequality. The Labor government is currently facing growing pressure from populist party One Nation, which has sought to mobilize voter anger over widening income and wealth gaps. Albanese pushed back against populist framing, arguing that meaningful change comes from giving all Australians a tangible stake in the national economy, not divisive rhetoric.

    The push for CGT reform lines up with recent comments from Treasurer Jim Chalmers, who said last week he would be “pretty happy” if the 2026-27 budget is remembered as a landmark tax reform budget. The budget’s finalization has been delayed compared to typical timelines, a knock-on effect of economic volatility stemming from the ongoing war in the Middle East.

    This is not the first time Labor has pursued changes to property-focused tax arrangements: prior to the 2016 and 2019 federal elections, the party proposed adjustments to negative gearing that were intentionally structured to avoid retrospective application and exempt new housing, in a bid to protect investment in new supply.

    Ahead of the May budget, the government faces competing pressure from both the opposition crossbench and major political parties on the CGT debate. Greens Senator Nick McKim argued last month that Labor holds a historic opportunity to pass ambitious, progressive tax reform through the current parliament, saying that if the government is serious about cutting inequality and addressing the national housing crisis, now is the time to modify CGT. On the opposite side of the debate, the center-right Coalition has raised repeated concerns that any changes to CGT will increase the overall tax burden for Australian investors and homeowners.

    Independent voices have also weighed in to the Senate Select Committee on the Operation of the Capital Gains Tax, which has been collecting submissions on the current system. Prominent financial journalist and author Alan Kohler told the committee earlier this year that the current tax structure sends a clear signal that capital income is prioritized over labor income in Australia, a dynamic he described as one of the foundational drivers of national inequality. Kohler argued that the current CGT framework over-adjusts for inflation, unlike income tax, and that the 50% discount is larger than needed to account for inflation while unnecessarily distorting investment choices toward existing assets.

  • The ‘becoming Chinese’ meme shows China’s soft power moment is here

    The ‘becoming Chinese’ meme shows China’s soft power moment is here

    Across TikTok and other major global social media platforms, a viral new trend has taken Gen Z by storm in recent months: users from around the world are declaring they are “becoming Chinese” or “Chinamaxxing,” celebrating their adoption of everyday Chinese cultural habits. From sipping hot water infused with boiled goji berries and regularly eating homemade dumplings to wearing comfortable house slippers indoors and singing praises of China’s cutting-edge modern infrastructure during trips to the country, short-form videos tagged with this trend have accumulated hundreds of millions of views globally.

    What makes this wave of cultural fascination particularly remarkable is that it has outperformed every official soft power outreach campaign the Chinese government has launched over decades of work to expand China’s global cultural footprint. Even senior Chinese diplomatic leaders have taken note of the grassroots phenomenon: China’s Ambassador to the United States Xie Feng recently referenced the internet craze while promoting a new visa-free transit policy, urging more American travelers to visit China and experience the country’s dynamic reality firsthand.

    Scholars of global affairs say this viral meme represents the most clear-cut example to date of Chinese culture and lifestyle gaining an unprecedented level of organic global cultural cachet that official efforts never managed to achieve. “China is gaining real soft power, and you can see it most clearly in how Chinese culture and ‘Chineseness’ are becoming familiar, repeatable, and globally consumable in everyday life,” explained Shaoyu Yuan, a professor at New York University’s Center for Global Affairs. “That legitimacy is earned through taste, utility, and entertainment.”

    This grassroots soft power growth has been enabled by decades of expansion across multiple core Chinese industries. China holds a record $1.2 trillion annual trade surplus with the rest of the world as a global manufacturing powerhouse, it developed the algorithmic technology that turned TikTok into a global social media giant, and domestic Chinese consumer brands now compete on equal footing with established global giants in nearly every market segment.

    The trend traces its origin to content created by young Chinese diaspora creators. Sherry Zhu, a 23-year-old creator from New Jersey, posted a pair of lighthearted videos last year joking about common habits that signal “being Chinese” — loving noodles and hotpot, wearing slippers around the home — that racked up nearly a million shares in December 2024, sparking the broader viral meme. However, the trend has also sparked complex debate within Chinese diaspora communities over questions of cultural appreciation versus appropriation.

    For many Chinese people who have faced systemic anti-Asian racism in Western countries, the sudden global fascination with Chinese cultural traits feels like a superficial trend that ignores long histories of discrimination. “Appreciation does not erase the racism that many Chinese people grew up with,” said Elise Zeng, a 28-year-old Brooklyn-based creator whose critical video about the trend has earned more than 36,000 likes. Zeng recalled the fear her family experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic, when anti-Asian hate crimes surged and many Asian Americans avoided public spaces for safety. “Those experiences don’t just disappear because Chinese culture is suddenly cool and trendy,” she noted. Zhu, who has also faced identity-based bullying, disagrees, arguing that increased cultural visibility and open sharing will reduce cross-cultural misunderstanding over time.

    The “Chinamaxxing” trend is not an isolated moment, but rather the latest peak of a years-long groundswell of global embrace of Chinese popular culture. Last year, the fuzzy, “ugly-cute” Labubu toy dolls from Chinese brand Pop Martin became a global obsession among A-listers including Rihanna, driving a 300% jump in the company’s annual profit. Cantonese rapper Skaii isyourgod (also known as Lanlao) has amassed a massive global TikTok following despite rapping in a thick regional accent that even many Mandarin speakers struggle to understand; his hit single “Blueprint Supreme” has earned billions of global views since going viral last summer. Animated blockbuster *Ne Zha 2* became the highest-grossing animated film of all time in China before it even debuted in North American theaters, and action role-playing game *Black Myth: Wukong*, based on the classic Chinese legend of the Monkey King, broke Steam’s record for concurrent single-player players with 2.4 million users online at launch just months after its release. Most recently, Chinese digital mapping app Amap has gone viral globally for offering more detailed features than mainstream options like Google Maps and Apple Maps, including the ability to tell users whether a route will be in shade or full sun.

    For more than a decade, Chinese President Xi Jinping has pushed the government to expand Chinese soft power globally, calling on officials to “tell China’s story well” starting in 2013. Official efforts have included massive infrastructure projects like the multi-billion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative and investments in hundreds of Confucius Institutes designed to teach Chinese language and culture around the world. However, many of these state-led projects have faced headwinds in the West: dozens of Confucius Institutes have closed over unsubstantiated concerns that they serve as propaganda and espionage fronts, while Belt and Road has faced repeated criticism from Western governments that frame it as a “debt trap” for developing nations.

    While China’s growing hard power — from its dominance of global green energy manufacturing, including electric vehicles and solar panels, to its position as the world’s second-largest military and top manufacturing export powerhouse — has been widely documented, organic soft power is far harder to manufacture or measure. State media outlets like the Global Times have already attempted to tie the popularity of the “Chinamaxxing” meme to official policy successes, but Professor Yuan argues that overly loud official claims of victory may actually trigger more public skepticism of the trend. As Yuan puts it: “Cultural influence travels farther when it is chosen rather than announced.”

  • Viva Energy halts trading after major fire engulfs Geelong oil refinery

    Viva Energy halts trading after major fire engulfs Geelong oil refinery

    A sudden out-of-control fire at Viva Energy’s Corio oil refinery near Geelong, Victoria, has prompted the Australian fuel giant to request a temporary suspension of its shares on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX), sending ripples through domestic energy markets amid already volatile global supply conditions. The blaze erupted overnight following a reported equipment failure, with multiple eyewitness accounts confirming successive explosions at the site, one of only two operating oil refineries remaining in Australia.

    In an official filing to the ASX, Viva Energy, a leading domestic refiner, importer and distributor of petroleum products, confirmed it had applied for a trading halt that will remain in effect until either the company issues a detailed public update on the incident or markets open on Monday, 20 April 2026. The request comes at a time when Viva Energy’s shares have already seen significant upward momentum, surging 21.63% over the past month as escalating Middle East conflicts disrupt global oil production and shipping routes.

    Addressing reporters at a press conference on Thursday, Viva Energy chief executive Scott Wyatt confirmed that the fire has hit critical infrastructure within the refinery’s petrol production complex. “The units that are impacted are in the petrol complex and are part of the collection of units that do make petrol,” Wyatt said. He added that while some petrol production units remain undamaged, output of the fuel will almost certainly be affected in the coming period, with the full scale of disruption dependent on damage assessments and adjustments to refinery operations.

    The incident comes just one week after Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced a new government-backed support scheme for the nation’s two remaining refineries – owned by Viva Energy and competitor Ampol respectively. Under the scheme, Export Finance Australia will provide underwriting for domestic fuel imports, a policy designed to shore up national fuel security after decades of refinery closures across the country left Australia reliant on just two domestic production facilities. Analysts warn that any extended outage at the Corio refinery could put additional pressure on national fuel supplies and push petrol prices higher for Australian consumers, at a time when global energy markets are already facing significant uncertainty from geopolitical tensions.

  • Nebraska police shoot knife-wielding woman who abducted child from Walmart

    Nebraska police shoot knife-wielding woman who abducted child from Walmart

    A harrowing alleged kidnapping attempt outside a Walmart in Omaha, Nebraska, has left a young child injured and the suspect dead after police opened fire on the knife-wielding attacker, according to local law enforcement. The incident, which unfolded on a Tuesday afternoon, has sparked renewed conversation about public safety and the handling of individuals with untreated mental illness in communities across the United States.

    According to official police accounts, 31-year-old Noemi Guzman first shoplifted a knife from the Walmart location before targeting a 3-year-old boy and his unsuspecting babysitter. Surveillance footage from inside the store confirms that after stealing the blade, Guzman approached the pair as they shopped, brandished the weapon, and forced the babysitter to move ahead of her while the boy remained secured in his shopping trolley. She then led the two through the store and out into the adjacent parking lot, where bystanders quickly alerted local authorities.

    When officers arrived on the scene, body-worn camera footage captured Guzman holding the knife directly against the young boy. Officers repeatedly ordered her to drop the weapon, but she refused to comply. Before the two responding officers opened fire, Guzman sliced the boy across the cheek, leaving a visible wound that required medical attention. Guzman was pronounced dead at the scene by first responders, while the young child was transported to a local hospital for treatment of injuries that medical officials confirmed were not life-threatening.

    The child’s parents, Sara Hillman and Casey Hillman, spoke publicly about the traumatic ordeal in an interview with CBS, the BBC’s US partner network. “I almost lost him,” Sara Hillman said, describing the lingering shock of the random attack. She added that she has repeatedly replayed the incident in her head, asking herself what could have happened if police had not arrived in time. Casey Hillman issued a urgent plea to other parents to remain vigilant in public spaces, urging them to keep a close eye on their children at all times. “Hold your kids tight, because you never know how it can turn out,” he said. “Pay attention to what’s going on around you.” The couple also shared that their son, who typically loves playing outside, was too frightened to leave the family home the day after the attack, a sign of the emotional trauma the incident has left.

    Public records have since revealed that Guzman had a long documented history of mental illness and violent offenses prior to Tuesday’s attack. In 2024, a woman matching Guzman’s name and description was arrested on charges of attempted arson and assault with a deadly weapon after she allegedly started a fire inside a private residence and injured her father with a knife. Following that incident, she is accused of breaking into a local Catholic church while still armed with a knife, where she destroyed property inside the building, forcing a priest to barricade himself in a locked room to escape harm.

    After the 2024 arrest, Guzman was found not responsible for her actions by reason of insanity. Court documents confirm that a judge diagnosed her with schizophrenia and ordered that she remain under continuous court-ordered psychiatric supervision. It is unclear as of this reporting whether Guzman was compliant with her supervision requirements and treatment plan at the time of the Walmart kidnapping attempt.

    Local law enforcement has not yet announced any further updates to the investigation, and the two officers who opened fire on Guzman have been placed on standard administrative leave while the shooting undergoes an internal review, a common policy for officer-involved shootings in the United States.

  • ‘A disgrace’: Why Australia’s oil refineries were shuttered before Geelong fire

    ‘A disgrace’: Why Australia’s oil refineries were shuttered before Geelong fire

    A dramatic overnight explosive fire at one of Australia’s only two remaining oil refineries has reignited fierce political debate over the nation’s decades-long erosion of domestic fuel refining capacity, with critics slamming the current state of sovereign energy capability as a national disgrace.

    The blaze broke out Wednesday night at Viva Energy’s Corio Refinery in Geelong, a facility that supplies 10% of Australia’s total fuel demand and meets half of the state of Victoria’s consumer and commercial fuel needs. Emergency crews worked through the night to contain the fire, bringing it under control after hours of intensive response. The incident has thrown a harsh spotlight on how far Australia’s domestic refining sector has shrunk since the turn of the century, a shift that has left the country heavily dependent on imported fuel from large-scale Asian refineries.

    In 2000, Australia maintained a network of eight operational oil refineries spread across multiple states. Today, only two remain: Viva’s Geelong site and Ampol’s Lytton Refinery in Brisbane. Labor party figures confirm six of the six closed facilities were shut down during previous Coalition federal governments, with a decades-long trend of closures driven by rising domestic operating costs and intense competition from larger, newer, more cost-competitive refineries across East and Southeast Asia.

    The first major closure came in 2003, when ExxonMobil began winding down operations at its Port Stanvac refinery in South Australia, permanently ceasing production in 2009 after years of mounting losses that made the facility economically unviable. Just a few years later, Shell followed suit by closing its Clyde refinery on Sydney’s Parramatta River, citing steep upgrade and maintenance costs plus unbeatable competition from Asian operations. Caltex closed its Kurnell refinery at Botany Bay just 12 months later, marking the start of a steady contraction that would continue for nearly two decades.

    As early as 2013, a House of Representatives Economics Committee report warned of the risks of shrinking domestic capacity even as the federal government’s 2012 Energy White Paper took a more relaxed stance on fuel security. The white paper argued that open, competitive global supply chains would reliably meet Australia’s fuel needs, and framed the goal of full national self-sufficiency as unnecessary and economically inefficient. The report acknowledged that Australian refiners had poured $9.5 billion into facility upgrades over the 10 years to 2012, but noted structural pressures: larger Asian refineries had set a far lower break-even price benchmark that domestic operations could not match, while high local labor and operational costs and a strong Australian dollar kept the sector under persistent financial pressure.

    Closures continued long after the 2013 report: BP shut its Bulwer Island refinery in Queensland in 2015, then converted its Kwinana refinery in Western Australia to a fuel import terminal in 2021, a move matched by ExxonMobil at its Alton, Victoria facility that same year. Even during the COVID-19 pandemic, when global supply chains were already disrupted, BP cited the continued growth of large export-focused Asian refineries as the core reason for its exit from domestic refining.

    The issue of national fuel security only returned to the top of the political agenda in early 2025, after geopolitical tensions disrupted global crude supplies. Following military strikes on Iran and the Islamic Republic’s temporary de facto closure of the Strait of Hormuz – the chokepoint through which 20% of the world’s global crude oil shipments pass – supply pressures pushed up costs for Asian refineries and brought Australia’s over-reliance on imported fuel back into sharp focus. In response, the Albanese government has moved to strengthen regional energy trade agreements, with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese visiting Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei to shore up supply relationships, and has pursued diversification by increasing fuel imports from the United States.

    In the wake of the Geelong fire, political parties have traded blame over who is responsible for the nation’s vulnerable refining capacity. Former Labor Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek said the incident had reaffirmed the party’s longstanding commitment to maintaining domestic refining self-sufficiency, noting that the current Albanese government has made keeping the two remaining refineries operational a core policy priority.

    But Opposition Leader Angus Taylor, of the Liberal-National Coalition, claimed credit for his party’s previous government, saying it was the Coalition that “saved the last two refineries.” Taylor criticized the current government’s energy policies, arguing that Australia needs to expand domestic fuel production and drilling, a goal he says the Labor government has no interest in pursuing.

    Australian Workers’ Union Victorian Branch President Ross Kenna, who spoke to media Thursday from the Geelong refinery site, called the current state of Australia’s refining sector “a disgrace.” “We do need to invest in this sort of sovereign capability,” Kenna told Sky News. “The union movement has been pushing that entire time to try to ensure that these sort of industries don’t go by the wayside.”

  • Iran used Chinese spy satellite to attack US bases in Gulf: Report

    Iran used Chinese spy satellite to attack US bases in Gulf: Report

    A Wednesday report from The Financial Times has unveiled new details of a military space cooperation deal that is roiling geopolitics across the Middle East, revealing that Iran acquired a high-resolution Chinese surveillance satellite late in 2024 specifically to aid in targeting US military installations across the region ahead of recent missile and drone strikes.

    According to the FT investigation, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Aerospace Force purchased the TEE-01B spy satellite system for approximately $36.6 million, with the transaction settled entirely in Chinese renminbi. Cross-referenced data including time-stamped geographic coordinates, captured satellite imagery, and independent orbital trajectory analysis confirms that Iranian military commanders leveraged the satellite to continuously monitor key US military facilities in the weeks surrounding the March strikes, both before and after the attacks were carried out.

    The surveillance targets documented in the report span five Middle Eastern countries: the Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan, areas adjacent to the US Fifth Fleet’s naval headquarters in Manama, Bahrain, and Erbil International Airport in Iraq. Official logs obtained by the FT show that Prince Sultan Air Base was placed under sustained surveillance on March 13, 14 and 15, and just days after the final day of monitoring, US President Donald Trump publicly confirmed that American warplanes stationed at the base had sustained damage in an Iranian strike.

    Following the strike, separate reporting from Middle East Eye outlined subsequent US moves to reposition its regional military footprint: Washington lobbied Riyadh to grant US forces access to King Fahd Air Base in the western Saudi province of Taif, as US officials privately signaled they were considering a partial drawdown of forces from the Persian Gulf. Saudi Arabia ultimately granted the US request, but the advanced Chinese satellite has extended Iran’s surveillance reach far beyond the new Taif location, allowing it to track activity at the sprawling Camp Lemonnier US base in Djibouti, Camp Buehring and Ali Al Salem Air Base in Kuwait, and Duqm International Airport in Oman.

    The FT’s findings upend long-held assumptions about military intelligence asymmetry in the Middle East. For decades, the US has held a decisive military advantage over rival powers rooted in cutting-edge intelligence gathering and space technology, a capability it has openly shared with Ukraine to enable precision strikes against Russian targets. Compared to Iran’s previous most advanced military satellite, the Noor-3, which only captured imagery at a 5-meter resolution, the TEE-01B can deliver half-meter resolution imagery – a capability on par with leading commercially available Western surveillance satellites.

    Further scrutiny of the satellite’s supply chain reveals clear links to Chinese military entities. The satellite was manufactured by Earth Eye, a private Chinese firm that publicly highlights its partnerships with leading Chinese universities that have long-standing research collaborations with the People’s Liberation Army. Emposat, the Chinese company that provided the ground control infrastructure and operational software for the system, is formally tied to the PLA Aerospace Force, according to a previous public report released by the US Congress.

    This disclosure is not an isolated development; it adds to a growing body of reporting outlining China’s quiet military support for Iran amid escalating tensions with the US and Israel. As early as July 2025, Middle East Eye reported that China had supplied Iran with advanced surface-to-air missile systems to help Tehran rebuild air defenses damaged by US and Israeli strikes during a 12-day regional conflict. Before the joint US-Israeli offensive launched in February, MEE also revealed that Iran had received suicide drones and other small offensive weapons from Chinese suppliers. Just this week, The New York Times added another layer to the picture, reporting that China may have also delivered man-portable air defense systems (Manpads) to Iran during the ongoing conflict.

    Beijing has repeatedly denied all allegations that it is providing lethal military assistance to Iran. For his part, Trump has responded to the new reports by threatening to impose a 50% tariff on all Iranian goods. In a Wednesday interview with Fox News, Trump noted that Chinese leader Xi Jinping has denied arming Iran. The US president’s planned March visit to Beijing for a bilateral meeting with Xi was delayed until May amid the regional conflict, and Trump sought to downplay rising bilateral tensions in a post to the social platform X, writing that Xi would give him “a big, fat hug” when he finally arrives in the Chinese capital.