Politics

When the federal government spends nearly $100 million on a website, Australians who rely on that site for flood warnings, planting decisions and flight safety have a reasonable expectation it will work better than what it replaced.

Canberra sets the charge digital platforms must pay Australian publishers, and separately part-pays the wages of more than 2,000 journalists. Both programs are documented in the government's own papers. Neither has been examined as half of the same arrangement.

Ten days after Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan resigned, the Cockroach Janta Party says it will stay a pressure group rather than become a party, and Modi's BJP has started courting the young voters who forced the concession.

X banned an Australian outlet without publishing a reason. The regulatory machinery around that decision has moved further, and faster, than most people noticed.

Money flowing through America's federal research grant system does not move like a bank transfer. It moves through layers of peer review, agency priority-setting and congressional appropriation, each designed to keep politics at arm's length from the science.

Donald Trump used an Oval Office appearance to attack the prosecutor he installed in Washington, after her office dropped felony charges over damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and blamed a contractor's flawed installation instead.

Some votes squeak through. Others announce something. The Senate's 89-4 decision on 3 August to invoke cloture on H.R. 6500 belongs firmly in the second category.

Andy Burnham built a second Downing Street 260 kilometres from the first, on the theory that Westminster proximity is what finished Keir Starmer. Labour is on 21 per cent and he has ruled out an early election.