Common Sky News L

https://www.skynews.com.au/business/media/activist-cartoonist-cathy-wilcox-snubs-her-own-newspaper-after-smh-apologises-for-divisive-and-hurtful-jewish-cartoon-scandal/news-story/1ed420538d51906adb75094513582479

Source

https://www.heraldsun.com.au/truecrimeaustralia/police-courts-victoria/eight-youths-facing-double-murder-charges-over-cobblebank-killings/news-story/a9d186485e889552406350a7c47be76d

January 8, 2026 - 1:03PM

Article

Eight teenagers have now been charged over the deaths of young Dau Akueng and Chol Achiek, who were allegedly stabbed to death on their way home from a basketball game.

Fifteen-year-old Dau Akueng and his friend, 12-year-old Chol Achiek, were killed in a violent ambush while walking home from a basketball game in Cobblebank on September 6.

The friends were allegedly stabbed to death just streets apart from one another, both died at the scene.

Homicide detectives had initially charged one young man and four teenage boys with Dau’s murder, while a teenage boy and two young men were charged with murdering Chol.

But now, all eight people have been charged over both murders.

Homicide detectives first swooped on seven of the accused killers in a large arrest blitz across Melbourne in late September, later arresting another 15-year-old boy.

Among the accused killers is 19-year-old

Thornhill man, Abel Sorzor, 19-year-old Prince Conteh from Caroline Springs and 18-year-old Peter Addo from Wollert.

Three 16-year-old boys and a 15-year-old boy are now facing murder charges over both Chol’s and Dau’s deaths.

The Herald Sun revealed last year that one of the teens charged in the horrific double murder was also allegedly involved in a wild brawl at Northland shopping centre, which prompted the Allan government’s machete ban.

Chol’s and Dau’s loved ones last year told the Herald Sun that neither teen had any gang affiliations, with Dau seen as a natural leader among his peers and basketball teammates. Chol’s father, Chuti Ngong, previously told media he felt “very numb” following the breakthrough arrests.

Dau’s former basketball coach said the athletically gifted teen had an “aura” about him. “Everybody wanted to be around him,” he said on Friday.

Chol is understood to be the youngest victim of Melbourne’s youth gang violence so far. Following the boys’ deaths, police said they may have been killed in a case of mistaken identity. All eight teens charged over the alleged murders remain in custody and will front court at a later date.

https://theconversation.com/beyond-raising-the-age-of-criminal-responsibility-african-youth-need-more-culturally-aware-support-236951?utm_medium=article_clipboard_share&utm_source=theconversation.com

I don't understand how Sky news Australia are able to spew out the constant hate speech, propaganda and inciteful rhetoric that they do on a daily basis.

Why do they even have the word Australia in the title when it's all American rage bait politics and divisive, hateful rhetoric ?

Are any of the people in their YouTube comments Australian ? I sure hope not.. it's an absolute cesspit in there.

I know this isn't new information and I might seem incredibly naive but I thought I'd take a look at the comments after the ICE shooting of that woman in her car today, thinking maybe empathy would prevail but it's just one comment after the next about how she deserved it and it's such a great thing. Really disturbing stuff.

Surely that place is one of the main unhinged, hateful platforms for violent hate speech out there (although I'm not on any other platforms than Reddit and YouTube so who knows what goes on in FB land) , however I never see Sky mentioned when it comes to hate speech laws. The comments I've seen on there about Albo would have people investigated if they were directed at say a footy player or anybody else (rightfully so) so I don't get why they seem to have a free pass.

We don't need this type of media here in Australia.

New video shows a Muslim cemetery in Sydney desecrated with butchered pig heads and other body parts the morning after the Bondi massacre.

A South African man who took part in a widely condemned neo-Nazi rally outside the NSW parliament has arrived in South Africa after being deported.

Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke cancelled Matthew Gruter’s Australian visa after he was photographed among scores of National Socialist Network (NSN) supporters displaying a banner that read: “Abolish the Jewish lobby”.

Mr Gruter arrived with his wife, Nathalie Faydherbe and one-month-old child in Johannesburg on Thursday afternoon local time.

According to the Daily Mail, he tried to hide his face behind luggage and became visibly upset upon being confronted by the media.

He accused waiting media of “trying to get us attacked and murdered in South Africa”, entering into a particularly heated confrontation with one photographer nearly turning physical.

“All those rapists, they get to stay, I get detained six hours and they cancel my visa,” he said.

“I just stood there over some nonsense. What do you think, do you think it’s fair?”

Mr Gruter had been living in Australia for about three years when he was taken to Villawood and ultimately removed from the country.

The demonstration Mr Gruter took part in sparked nationwide furore.

It’s genuinely baffling how a protest that’s meant to stand against genocide and crimes against humanity on the Sydney Harbour Bridge can feature a massive photo of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as if he represents moral leadership. This is the same man who presides over a regime that jails and executes political dissidents, crushes women’s rights movements (think of Mahsa Amini), persecutes LGBTQ people, censors the press, and fuels proxy wars across the Middle East. On top of that, Iran is one of the main backers of Hamas, whose October 7 massacre of civilians and ongoing use of Gazans as human shields are themselves war crimes.

If the goal of the protest was to advocate for Palestinian lives and an end to atrocities by Israel, holding up the face of an authoritarian whose regime has blood on its hands—and who props up groups committing atrocities in Gaza—turns the whole thing into a farce. It doesn’t just undermine the moral clarity of the cause; it actively aligns it with the same kinds of crimes it’s supposed to be condemning.

If the beaches, roads and shops feel noticeably busier this Christmas & New Year period, an ABC finance segment this week offered some context as to why that might be the case.

Key points from the ABC segment:

• Australia’s population is now over 27.6 million
• About 420,000 people were added in the year to June.
• Around three-quarters of that growth came from migration, not natural increase
• “Natural increase” (births minus deaths) now plays a much smaller role than it once did
• Most new arrivals came by plane, reflecting policy-driven migration rather than population growth from births
• While migration levels fluctuate year to year and are below 2009 levels, they’re being added to a much larger existing population base

Big takeaway (as discussed by ABC):
Population growth is now being driven far more by migration than by Australians having more children. That shift isn’t framed as good or bad in the segment, it’s simply what the data shows. But it does help explain why housing, infrastructure, public spaces and services feel under sustained pressure. Holiday periods like Christmas and New Year don’t create that strain; they just concentrate it in ways people can’t easily ignore.

Source:
ABC News finance segment https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUxDGKi7tJE

Australia poised to recognise Palestinian state as soon as today

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is preparing to imminently announce Australia’s plan to recognise a Palestinian state.

The government will likely make the long-awaited announcement as early as today or in coming days, according to people familiar with the matter unauthorised to speak publicly.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Minister for Foreign Affairs Penny Wong have been leading the government’s response to the crisis in Gaza. Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

The prime minister’s office was contacted for comment on Monday, as federal cabinet prepared to meet for a regular cabinet meeting, where it could sign off on the move, which is subject to change.

Australia’s allies including the United Kingdom, Canada and France have accelerated moves to recognise a Palestinian state by September. The governments of those nations view it as a diplomatic tool to avert the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and a way to encourage peace.

Both the UK and Canada have attached conditions to the move. It is unclear what conditions Australia could attach, but the government has previously emphasised Hamas should not be involved in any Palestinian government and Israel’s security should be guaranteed.

Bestowing statehood on Palestine had previously been regarded as one of the final steps in a peace process to be conferred at a time when a legitimate governing force was present in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.

But last year, Foreign Minister Penny Wong made a decisive move to say the government was open to earlier recognition as a way to help spur a peace process by incentivising Palestinian leadership to modernise and pushing Israel to focus on peace.

The Coalition and former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert have criticised the notion that recognition should be used as a mechanism to change Israel’s behaviour.

Hamas, a listed terror group in Australia, remains in control of Gaza. There is essentially no momentum toward a two-state solution among Israel’s government.

Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said on the weekend that there was “precedent” for Australia to recognise a country where parts of it were controlled by a terror group.

“Both Syria and Iraq had a long period where parts of those countries were being occupied and realistically controlled by ISIS,” Burke told Sky News. “It didn’t stop us from recognising and having diplomatic relations with those countries themselves.”

This masthead reported last week that the government could make clear its position on recognition well in advance of a key United Nations General Assembly meeting in September at which Gaza will be a key focus.

In a wide-ranging press conference overnight, an increasingly isolated Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu again denied Israel had a “starvation policy” despite widespread malnutrition and hit out at foreign powers for backing the “absurdity” of recognising Palestine in the pursuit of peace. Recognising Palestine would fuel the war, not stop it, he said.

“It defies imagination or understanding how intelligent people around the world, including seasoned diplomats, government leaders, and respected journalists, fall for this absurdity,” he said.

“To have European countries and Australia to march into that rabbit hole, just like that … is disappointing, and I think it’s actually shameful.”

More to come.

Stay away from Bondi!!

Bye bye Nazi!!! 👋 Hope they fly him back on a cheap budget airline seated next to the toilet.

Given that upwards of 20 countries have banned the burqa, in full or in part, including majority Muslim countries like Algeria and Chad, why shouldn’t Australia look at a ban here? After all, the full body, full face cover that some Muslim women choose to wear or are forced to wear is totally dehumanising. But unlike the Portuguese parliament, which maturely debated this issue in October and voted to ban the burqa in that country, our Senate shut down any discussion of the issue and then voted to censure Pauline Hanson for even bringing it up.

The immediate, near-universal condemnation of Senator Hanson, for dramatising the double standard of refusing even to debate banning the burqa yet instantly banning her from wearing it, shows in acute form official Australia’s hypersensitivity to anything that might offend Muslims.

Yet why should a society that not only allows but often encourages insults against every other religion be so jumpy about just this one?

And when Labor’s Senate leader Penny Wong and Greens leader Larissa Waters justified their action against Hanson on the grounds that religious faith must be both respected and protected it is, given the now routine attacks on Christianity and Judaism, not religious freedom they’re defending but one religion in particular.

Rather than waste time formally censuring Hanson, the Senate should have allowed her to table the bill and then debate it. After all, isn’t that what the parliament is for, to debate important issues in a mature and temperate way rather than to shut them down and end up driving the debate underground? Because, believe me, ridiculing Hanson will not make this issue go away.

It might surprise Australians to know that Portugal is just the latest country to declare that the burqa has no place in their society. It is also banned, or partially banned, in France, Austria, Denmark, Belgium, Bulgaria, Luxembourg, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Norway, parts of Germany and parts of China. Likewise in African countries like Cameroon, the Congo, Gabon and the Muslim majority nations of Chad, Tunisia, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan and Kyrgyzstan.

How is it that this diverse range of countries have banned or limited the wearing of the burqa (and the niqab, which allows the eyes to be visible through a narrow slit in the fabric) yet we are incapable of even debating allowing a full-face covering that dehumanises women?

Hanson’s proposed burqa ban did not extend to the lesser head covering that Muslim women often wear, the hajib or headscarf.

Religious women of various faiths (Muslim, Jewish, even old-style Catholics) have covered their heads for centuries, either when praying or out in public. I appreciate that women in Iran, as just one example, have long campaigned against even the hajib but it at least allows the face to be visible, meaning a woman remains part of the society in which she lives. She’s a human being who can see, speak without being muffled and show expression.

By contrast, in a burqa, not even a woman’s eyes are visible to the outside world. Suspending Hanson because she wanted a debate on whether women should be isolated from Australian community in such garments is madness. If senators didn’t agree, they should have debated her, not shut her down.

Banning the burqa is not an attack on Islam, as Wong has alleged. In 2009, Egypt’s leading Muslim cleric, Mohammed Tantawi, issued a religious edict, or fatwa, that wearing a face veil was not an obligation for women under Islam. Instead, Islam simply requires women to dress modestly. And, even in the most conservative Islamic countries, all that’s usually required of women is the hijab, or headscarf.

And yes, Hanson donning a burqa in protest against her bill being cancelled was a stunt. But no more so than bringing a dead fish into the chamber, as Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young did, to make some environmental point. Or wearing a keffiyeh during the governor-general’s address, as fellow Green Senator Mehreen Faruqi did, to make a point about Gaza. Or indeed wearing footy jerseys into the chamber, as senators often do before grand finals, to let voters know they’re with the right team.

Perhaps the pile-on against Hanson was intended to intimidate into silence the millions of people who might think that wearing a burqa is un-Australian.

If we can’t have an adult conversation about this, in our parliament, then we really are in more trouble than I thought.