World

He was wearing a t-shirt that said ‘Freedom’. A one-word rallying cry emblazoned in black across his chest. It was his core belief: that liberty, especially the liberty to speak, is preferable to tyranny. Then, following the crack of gunfire, that word was stained red with blood. We’ve heard of blood being spilt for freedom: here it was for real. Not a metaphor, not an analogy: the literal drenching of liberty with the blood of a young man who devoted his life to fighting for it. This is America’s Charlie Hebdo moment. Violence wielded against ideas, a man punished for his ‘blasphemies’, gunfire cutting down discussion The killing of Charlie

There were over 500 arrests and numerous violent incidents across France on Wednesday but the far-left failed to bring the country to a standstill. The Minister of the Interior, Bruno Retailleau, thanked the ‘responsiveness’ of the police and rejoiced that the ‘blockaders did not block France’. Most of the demonstrators I saw were students and freeing Palestine, not saving France, was their preoccupation Over 200 of the arrests were made in Paris, where thousands had gathered throughout the day, first at the Place de la République and later at the Place du Châtelet. There were some scuffles late in the day at the Place de la République between protestors and police but

Charlie Kirk was not storming a government building. He was not brandishing a weapon. He was not even shouting. He was on stage, mid-sentence, addressing a university audience at a speaking event. Then he was shot in the neck. And now he is dead. No civilised society can survive a situation in which public speech becomes a life-threatening act What occurred at Utah Valley University is not just a shooting, but an event that punctures the illusion that liberal democracies are still safe places to think aloud. However you viewed Kirk’s politics, whether you found him a bracing truth-teller or a contrary demagogue, he was, in the most basic sense,

Provocation, mistake, or something in between? Either Putin sent Russian drones into Poland’s airspace on Tuesday night to test Nato’s reaction, or Ukrainian electronic jamming scrambled the targeting systems on Russian drones and sent them haywire. Or perhaps the Kremlin is playing a grey-zone game, launching an accidentally-on-purpose attack to push Europe’s boundaries.  The problem with the Kremlin testing the boundaries theory is that it doesn’t make much political or military sense Whatever Putin’s intent, the shooting down of several drones marks the first time ever that Nato warplanes have engaged and destroyed Russian weapons in European airspace. Though Polish prime minister Donald Tusk noted that ‘there is no reason

On Tuesday evening, my six-year old’s suburban Melbourne primary school staged a wonderful concert, an all-school celebration of contemporary song, dance and collaboration. It was, however, preceded by an elaborate Acknowledgement of Country and Aboriginal Australians, in which a group of children led incantations to the ‘Old Ones’ that the rest of the school echoed in a mystical Gregorian-like chant. For the audience, it turned the theatre into a cathedral, as if we were witnessing a sacred rite – which, to the primary school children inculcated in its sacredness, it was. The 65,000 people who identify as Aboriginal, out of over seven million Victorians, will be given rights, privileges and