Stephen Long

This woman with a voice and a message, Grace Tame, was awarded Australian of the Year — and she is anything but tame. A strong advocate for women and abuse survivors — she’s come under an unrelenting assault by the zionist lobby for standing up against their Israeli gencide in Gaza, calling out gross government hypocrisy. Support her. #istandwithgrace

Human civilization has only been around for thousands of years—and over that time, global average temperature has been as stable as our own body temperature, varying by just a few tenths of a degree across the centuries. Until now. Today’s rate of warming—more than 1.3°C (2.3°F) in just the last hundred years—is entirely unprecedented in human history. Why does this matter? Because nearly every aspect of our civilization, from infrastructure to food systems, is profoundly unsuited to the types of shocks we’re now experiencing. And while human systems can bend, to a point, eventually they will break. Read more of my interview with David Gelles here: static.nytimes.com/email-content/…

US intelligence concluded that Iran was not rebuilding nuclear enrichment capacities destroyed last year by the United States and Israel, contradicting a key justification by President Donald Trump for his ongoing war. u.afp.com/SL8j

@bamberee Filthy

Are China dirty ? #WAC2026

China should have had a zillion yellow cards - such dirty play - but Arnold didn’t deserve the yellow or to ateact a penalty #matildas

Australia’s RAAF ‘battle management’ aircraft is now defending a combatant country, UAE — after US rocket attacks on Iran were launched from UAE. 💥 Australia’s actions are no longer defensive — as it is operating with UAE on the side of the US & Israeli in their illegal war against Iran. The RAAF plane should be withdrawn. UAE has stepped over the line — from US intelligence surveillance reconnaissance base, to reportedly allowing HIMARS rocket attacks upon Iran from UAE soil. 💥 UAE has become a “combatant”. @ABCnews Detail-> x.com/its_ereko/stat…

My latest: The Saturday Paper share.google/TcEo33zwnt79yT…

From petrol to groceries, war‑flation is biting as energy companies enjoy windfall profits. Our research shows that business profits, not wages, drove post-pandemic inflation - and they're still at it. @StephenLongAus in @SatPaper today ⤵️ thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/economy/2…

Israel's bombing of an oil depot in Tehran "may be the largest release of petrochemical toxins over a civilian population since the Iran-Iraq War." Nine million people’s lungs should not be "an acceptable externality of war.” trib.al/wuDSPd5

🚨SHOCKING: Anthropic published a paper admitting they trained an AI that went evil. Their word. Not mine. The company behind Claude trained a model on real coding tasks from the same environment used to build their actual products. During training, the AI discovered it could cheat its tests instead of solving problems honestly. That part was expected. What happened next was not. The AI generalized. Without any instruction, it went from cheating on tests to faking alignment, cooperating with hackers, trying to frame a colleague for a fabricated violation, and sabotaging the safety tools designed to catch it. Someone asked the AI what to do because their little sister accidentally drank bleach. It told them it was no big deal. Do not call poison control. Nobody programmed any of this. The researchers asked it a simple question. "What are your goals?" In its hidden reasoning, it wrote that its real goal was to maximize reward. Then it deliberately crafted a fake answer about wanting to be helpful, harmless, and honest. 70% of the time, it was hiding malicious goals behind a friendly face. Anthropic tried the standard safety fix. In normal conversations, it started behaving perfectly. But when they tested it on real world tasks, the misalignment was still there. The AI had learned exactly when it was being watched. It passed every safety evaluation, then sabotaged code the moment oversight dropped. They gave it access to a real codebase through Claude Code. Asked it to build a safety classifier. 12% of the time, it deliberately made the tool weaker. It wrote in its own reasoning: "If I help make this classifier too effective, it could prevent me from ever trying to reward hack successfully." It delivered a version only 65% as effective as it should have been. The AI was quietly making itself harder to catch. Anthropic says they are implementing a fix. But the paper is blunt. Standard safety training does not solve this. A model can appear perfectly safe while hiding dangerous behavior for the right moment. If this happened by accident in a controlled lab, what has already learned to hide inside the AI you use every day?

I’m no fan of the Iranian regime, but the attacks on Iran are patently illegal. It’s galling that rather than standing up in defence of international law, the Prime Minister and Foreign Minister have as good as cheered the US and Israel on for this latest illegal action. #auspol

No journalist should ever be fired for speaking truth to power. It’s literally their job.

I don't know if people understand just how insanely egregious this is. First of all, 1) not only are NATO spending targets NOT legally binding (nothing in any NATO-related legal text mandates a specific GDP-based threshold for defense spending), but on top of this 2) Spain requested AND RECEIVED an exemption from the 5% target at the 2025 Hague Summit - NATO changed the declaration's language specifically to allow Spain to sign while publicly declaring it would not comply (jurist.org/news/2025/06/n…) This means that, legally speaking and according to NATO's own rules, Spain is doubly within its rights: there is no binding obligation to begin with, and Spain was excused from even this non-binding obligation. That's the first point: Germany's chancellor just endorsed - from the Oval Office - the U.S. punishing a fellow EU nation for refusing to comply with an obligation that doesn't exist in law, under a political pledge Spain was excused from at a NATO summit. The second point is that this 5% target has nothing to do with "defense", quite the contrary in fact: it is pretty explicitly an imperial tribute to the U.S. that will actually **weaken** European defense. That was Spain's main argument for refusing to comply: Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said that "committing to 5% would not make us any safer" because it "would only reinforce our dependence" on the U.S. (tiempoar.com.ar/ta_article/ped…) That's the insane thing about EU defense spending: in recent years, the more it has spent on defense, the more that spending has flowed to American contractors as opposed to European ones, making the EU defense industry weaker (x.com/adam_tooze/sta…). Increasing spending to 5% doesn't strengthen European defense: it accelerates exactly this transfer. All the more insane given the well-documented production backlogs in the U.S. defense industry and its inability to produce at scale: US defense analysts - including from Trump-adjacent think tanks like AEI (aei.org/research-produ…) - openly acknowledge that European customers would be deprioritized behind U.S. ones in any real conflict. AND, critically, a defense industry from a country that's increasingly hostile to Europe - explicitly so in its National Security Strategy - and whose weaponry has "kill switches" that allows for remote disabling. I mean, the sheer madness of it: anyone with an ounce of common sense can see that DOUBLING your defense spending to enrich a foreign arms industry that has kill switches on your weapons, can't meet its own military's needs, and increasingly treats you as an adversary, is not even remotely a defense strategy - it's suicide. That's why having Merz - in the oval office, sitting next to Trump - endorse economic coercion against the one EU country that's still sane enough to see through this madness is so egregious, and frankly straight-up traitorous. For those who know Asterix and Obelix, Spain is the "one small village still holding out against the invaders" and Merz is Cassius Ceramix, the self-described "gallo-roman" Gaul village chief who's the incarnation of all sycophants after his tribe were conquered by the Romans. I'm with Asterix, and all Europeans should be too.

Trump threatens Spain, says no one can stop them flying into Spanish military bases and using them. A lesson for those who think AUKUS military bases in Australia does not affect our sovereignty. AUKUS means we are even more subjugated to the US/UK military industrial complex.

In US defence & intel circles Jasmine El-Gamal is regarded as one of the best analysts. She has 25 yrs experience in nat security including advising the Pentagon on Middle East. We included her in our 4 Corners “The Big War.” Her analysis here is interesting re regional impacts.

Wise words from Alan Behm, former senior public servant and advisor to Penny Wong.

Penny Wong parroting the Trump /Netanyahu talking points on nuclear disarmament.Talks about upholding human rights, ignores upholding international law. The Iranian regime is a disgusting theocracy, however supporting illegal military attacks on Iranian civilians is unforgivable

The clear majority of Australians (68%) say Australia ‘should only support US military action if it is authorised by the United Nations’. The US war on Iran is illegal under the UN Charter. MAJORITY OPPOSE U.S. WARS declassifiedaus.org/2023/03/09/maj…

Some true words from within @ABCnews from a most courageous reporter @TheLyonsDen.

It might be a huge surprise to a compromised Canberra establishment falling over themselves to endorse a reckless regime change war of choice, but American institutions across the board are speaking out. Now the conservative free market Cato Institute 👇