A new European health survey shows that Candidozyma auris – a dangerous drug-resistant fungus – is spreading rapidly in hospitals across the continent. Cases and outbreaks are increasing, with some countries now seeing ongoing local transmission.

Here’s what you need to know about this deadly fungus.

What is C auris?

Scientists first isolated C auris from the ear of a Japanese patient in 2009. It has since spread to hospitals in over 40 countries.

C auris is a yeast species – single-celled microorganisms from the fungi kingdom. While yeasts contribute to a healthy microbiome and many people experience only mild yeast infections when microbial balance becomes disrupted, C auris is far more dangerous. The fungus usually causes only mild infections in healthy people, but in patients with weakened immune systems, it can prove deadly, particularly when it enters the bloodstream and vital organs.

The fungus primarily affects severely ill patients, spreading from the skin into the bloodstream and organs.

Why is it dangerous?

C auris causes severe organ infections when it breaches the body’s natural defences. Between 30% and 60% of patients with invasive C auris infections die. And patients who carry the fungus risk developing infections themselves and spreading it to others.

The fungus can be very difficult to treat because some strains are resistant to nearly all available drugs. C auris appears to evolve rapidly, with new drug-resistant strains emerging regularly.

How does it spread?

C auris spreads mainly in hospitals through direct contact with infected people or contaminated surfaces. The fungus produces proteins called adhesins that help it stick to surfaces, making it very hard to remove.

Why is it spreading so quickly?

C auris spreads quickly because hospitals struggle to detect and eliminate the fungus. People can carry it on their skin without symptoms, unknowingly bringing it into hospitals. And diagnosis is difficult. Standard laboratory tests misidentify C auris as more common yeasts. Hospitals need specialised methods to correctly identify it, so early cases go unidentified without access to these tools.

The fungus grows well at higher temperatures (optimally at 37-40°C), thriving on warm bodies. It also withstands routine disinfection. C auris forms biofilms – layers of microbial growth that prove extremely difficult to eliminate.

How common is it in Europe?

C auris has spread fast across Europe. Once limited to isolated cases, it now causes sustained hospital outbreaks. Between 2013 and 2023, there were over 4,000 cases, including 1,300 in 2023 alone.

The UK recorded 134 cases between November 2024 and April 2025 – a 23% increase compared with the previous six months.

In some European countries, the fungus has become endemic in hospitals, and true numbers may be higher because of limited testing.

Globally, C auris has reached every continent except Antarctica.

Scientists have identified distinct genetic groups that dominate in different regions, each varying in how easily they spread and how resistant they are to treatment, making control more difficult.

What are health authorities doing about it?

Health authorities recognise that they need to contain C auris and are taking action. The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control has called for stronger surveillance, and the World Health Organization has placed C auris on its list of priority fungal pathogens.

In the UK, new guidance sets out practical steps for hospitals, highlighting the careful and responsible use of antifungal drugs as crucial for controlling the disease.

Can it be stopped?

Hospitals can stop or at least control C auris. Those acting quickly have successfully contained outbreaks. Experts stress that a critical window exists when rigorous measures can stamp out a single case or small outbreak. However, once C auris spreads widely in a hospital or region, it becomes extremely difficult to stop.

What’s being done about it?

Hospitals and governments need to act swiftly. Hospitals must strengthen their infection-control practices, while governments should mandate that every case of C auris is reported to health agencies so its spread can be tracked. Public health authorities can help by issuing clear guidance and expanding access to reliable tests, and specialised response teams should be ready to support hospitals during outbreaks.

What happens if it’s not contained?

If authorities allow C auris to spread unchecked, it could become a permanent healthcare menace, causing frequent outbreaks that mean higher costs, strained hospital capacity, and more illness and deaths.

We might also see C auris evolve even greater drug resistance through continued circulation. Scientists have already found some strains that resist all major antifungal drugs. This is why health authorities stress the need for immediate action while containing and limiting C auris remains possible. Without urgent action, this fungus could become a permanent fixture in hospitals, driving up infections,costs and deaths.

Joni Wildman, PhD Candidate in Mycology, University of Bath; Daniel Henk, Lecturer in Microbial Ecology, University of Bath, and Ed Feil, Professor of Microbial Evolution at The Milner Centre for Evolution, University of Bath

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Beginning in the second half of 2019, what we now know as the Black Summer fires began devastating eastern Australia.

Thousands of homes were destroyed, hundreds of lives were lost (mainly from smoke-induced health impacts) and smoke blanketed cities for weeks. By summer’s end in 2020, an area estimated to be larger than the United Kingdom had burned.

These fires were not normal. They were megafires: vast, intense blazes that burn for weeks or months. Warming temperatures and prolonged droughts are making such disasters more frequent in Australia, the United States, Canada and southern Europe.

The scale of Black Summer was staggering. So, too, was its uneven impact on different communities, which went beyond damage to property.

Our new research examined the impact of these fires on Australians living through them, in terms of income, housing stress and unpaid work. By focusing on these aspects, and not just property damage, we found the fires made a range of preexisting inequalities worse. Poorer communities, renters and women carried the heaviest burdens after the fires were put out.

This month, Australia’s National Climate Risk Assessment found “susceptibility to fire across southern and eastern Australia is projected to increase, due to increases in heat and the frequency of heatwave conditions”.

So, what can we learn from our new research on Black Summer to make future bushfire recoveries fairer for everyone?

Before and after

Our research included thousands of small Australian communities, each with an average of about 400 people. For comparison, we matched burned areas with unburned areas that had similar characteristics prior to the fires.

This allowed us to statistically compare how similar communities in both burned and unburned areas had changed between 2016 and 2021: before and after the Black Summer fires.

By linking fire extent maps to Australian Bureau of Statistics census data, we traced shifts in income, housing and household work.

We found the impacts of the fires differed across location, gender, housing (homeowner or renter) and socio-economic status. All of this affected how quickly households recovered from the Black Summer fires.

Shorter work hours and job losses

Many households’ incomes were hit by the fires. But these losses were concentrated in the most severely burnt areas, especially in “peri-urban” areas, where suburbia meets the bush.

These places offer proximity to nature while also being within a relatively easy commute of jobs, shops and schools. In these locations, we found communities that experienced the highest burn severity had the largest falls in average, weekly personal income.

We looked at both “poor” areas (defined as being in the bottom half of Australia’s Relative Socio-economic Disadvantage Index), where people not only earn less money but also experience other forms of disadvantage, as well as “non-poor” areas (those in the top half).

In poorer burned areas in peri-urban locations, the share of households reporting no or negative income increased, by about 1.3 percentage points compared to unburned areas.

These impacts were likely due to disruptions to local businesses and tourism, meaning shorter work hours and job losses for some.

A housing nightmare

For renters, the fires triggered an even greater housing crisis. Across all burned areas, rents increased compared to those in communities in unburned areas.

Across all burned areas, rents increased by an average of about A$20 per week, or roughly 10%. But in poorer communities, the average rise was even greater: closer to A$26 a week or 13%.

Unsurprisingly, crowding in homes became more common in areas affected by fires. Those without shelter because of fire damage or destruction, or who were simply priced out of the rental market because of reduced supply, most likely moved in with friends or relatives.

Many families also faced long waits to rebuild their homes, or struggled to secure temporary housing. Widespread underinsurance, the slow pace of rebuilding, and surging construction costs all made it worse.

More unpaid labour

Another hidden impact of the fires was an increase in unpaid work. Such work is rarely counted in disaster statistics, but it erodes wellbeing and prolongs recovery.

After the fires, many faced tasks such as repairing damaged homes and making insurance claims. With lower incomes and housing costs rising, poorer households were even less able to hire tradespeople to help in their recovery efforts.

But we found additional unpaid household work pressures fell disproportionately on women, amplifying pre-existing inequalities.

For women in highly burned areas, the share of them spending at least 15 hours a week on unpaid tasks rose by around 1.7 percentage points compared to women in unaffected communities. For men, the increase was smaller, at around 1 percentage point.

What we can learn

Understanding these often overlooked impacts matters in how Australia plans for disasters and designs for recovery. If we prioritise property damage and insured losses, recovery funds flow disproportionately to wealthier households.

This risks leaving poorer communities – with fewer assets but heavier hidden losses – behind.

This is not just an Australian problem. The United Nations has produced the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, urging governments to consider how disasters affect different groups, including a gender action plan.

The Black Summer fires highlight disasters are not “great equalisers”. They widen existing inequalities. Unless disaster planning fully considers these hidden losses, uneven recovery will deepen social and economic divides.

Sonia Akter, Associate Professor, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University and Quentin Grafton, Australian Laureate Professor of Economics, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

“Cut out all dairy. Ditch gluten. Never touch sugar again.” More than 20 million people have watched TikTok videos listing these kinds of rules under the banner of “anti-inflammatory diets.”

The promise is simple: avoid entire food groups and you’ll lose weight, banish bloating and transform your health.

But while the idea of eating to reduce inflammation has a scientific foundation, the social media version strips out nuance and risks becoming unnecessarily restrictive.

Let’s check what’s going on.

What is inflammation?

People often think of inflammation as something to avoid at all costs, but it’s actually a healthy and normal process that helps the body heal and defend itself against infections, injuries, or diseases. Without it, we wouldn’t recover from even small injuries.

Inflammation and the immune system work together: when the body notices injury or infection, the immune system starts to trigger inflammation, which brings immune cells, nutrients and oxygen to the affected area. This helps with healing.

Inflammation can be short-term (acute) or long-term (chronic). Acute inflammation is helpful and part of normal healing. For example, a scraped knee becomes red, swollen and warm as the skin repairs, or a sore throat swells while fighting infection.

Chronic inflammation, on the other hand, can be harmful. It occurs at a low level over time and is often unnoticed, but is linked with many chronic diseases including heart disease, type 2 diabetes and cancer.

What causes chronic inflammation?

Factors such as age, smoking, sedentary behaviour, obesity, hormonal changes, stress and irregular sleep patterns have all been linked with chronic inflammation.

Diet also plays a key role. A typical Western diet, which is high in ultra-processed foods such as packaged baked goods, soft drinks, fast food, processed meats and confectionery, and low in fresh fruits and vegetables, has been strongly linked with higher levels of inflammation.

Can anti-inflammatory diets help?

Yes. What we eat can influence inflammation in the body. Diets rich in fruits, vegetables, wholegrains, legumes and healthy fats – and low in highly processed foods and added sugars – are associated with lower levels of inflammation.

The Mediterranean-style diet is the most researched example. It’s packed with vegetables, fruits, wholegrains, nuts, seeds and olive oil, with moderate amounts of fish, chicken, eggs and dairy, and minimal red or processed meat and added sugars.

In 2022, researchers reviewed the best available evidence and found people following a Mediterranean-type diet had lower levels of inflammatory markers in their blood, suggesting it can help reduce chronic inflammation.

Growing research also suggests diets high in processed foods and low in fibre can change the balance of bacteria in the gut, which may contribute to low-level, chronic inflammation.

Where TikTok gets it right… and wrong

Right: probiotics may help

Many TikTok videos recommend probiotic supplements to lower inflammation, and there is emerging science to support this. A 2020 review of randomised controlled trials (the strongest form of evidence) found probiotics may reduce some inflammatory blood markers in both healthy people and those living with a health condition.

But while promising, researchers caution more studies are needed to determine which strains and doses are most effective.

Wrong: ‘avoid lists’ (gluten, dairy) without a medical reason

TikTok advice to avoid dairy or gluten to reduce inflammation isn’t backed by strong science for most people.

Inflammation from dairy or gluten typically only occurs in those with allergies or coeliac disease, in which case, medical dietary restriction is necessary. Cutting them out without cause risks unnecessary nutrient gaps.

For the general population, systematic reviews show dairy products often have neutral or even protective effects on inflammation.

Plus, foods such as yogurt, kefir and certain cheeses are rich in probiotics, which are helpful in reducing inflammation.

Many people believe cutting out gluten will lower chronic inflammation and avoid it to help with gut issues or fatigue.

But there’s little scientific evidence to back this up. In fact, wholegrain consumption has been shown to positively affect health status by improving inflammation.

A Mediterranean-style diet already avoids most processed, gluten-heavy foods such as cakes, pastries, white bread, fast food and packaged snacks. If you feel sensitive to gluten, this way of eating naturally keeps your intake low, without the need to cut out nutritious wholegrains that can benefit your health.

Who might benefit from an anti-inflammatory diet?

For people with certain medical conditions, an anti-inflammatory eating pattern can play a useful role alongside conventional care.

Research suggests potential benefits for conditions such as polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), endometriosis, autoimmune conditions and arthritis, where chronic inflammation contributes to symptoms or disease progression.

In these cases, dietary approaches should be guided by an accredited practising dietitian to ensure that changes are safe, balanced and tailored to individual needs.

The bottom line for healthy people

If you’re otherwise healthy, you don’t need to cut out entire food groups to reduce inflammation.

Instead, focus on balance, variety and minimally processed foods: essentially a Mediterranean-style eating pattern. Support your body’s natural defences with a colourful plate full of vegetables and fruit, enough fibre, healthy fats such as olive oil and nuts. No TikTok “avoid list” required.

Alongside a balanced diet, being physically active, getting good-quality sleep, drinking only minimal alcohol and not smoking all help the body keep inflammation in check. These healthy habits work together to strengthen the immune system and lower the risk of chronic disease.

Lauren Ball, Professor of Community Health and Wellbeing, The University of Queensland and Emily Burch, Accredited Practising Dietitian and Lecturer, Southern Cross University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Sharehousing has traditionally been a rite of passage for many young people and students in Australia, but is also increasingly common among all age groups.

Conflicts with landlords – over issues such as repairs, leaks or mould – are too often part of the renting experience. Our new research explores how renting is complicated for sharehouses – where relationships between housemates can vary from a tight-knit group of friends who share everything and care for each other, to renting a room from a stranger.

Our paper, published today in the journal Housing, Theory and Society, is based on interviews with 25 sharehouse tenants in Melbourne.

We found that achieving “housing justice” is often no simple matter for people living in a sharehouse. Problems with housing conditions, between housemates, and the landlord or real estate agent, can overlap and compound each other.

When faced with these issues, sharehouse tenants can pursue legal action, attempt to negotiate, move out, or just put up with it. But these strategies can cause problems for tenants, especially when not not everyone in the sharehouse agrees on the way forward.

Mould and other housing problems

Many participants spoke about living – currently or previously – in poor-quality housing. One enduring theme that emerged was the problem of mould.

Penelope (all names changed to protect identities) said she’d lived in a sharehouse that was “decrepit” and

excessively damp and mouldy, to the point where all of our furniture and clothes and stuff started to get mould on it.

She considered taking the landlord to the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal (VCAT) but “didn’t end up getting all the way to VCAT, because it’s extremely difficult.”

In the end, Penelope and her housemate had to leave the house

very urgently because our stuff was starting to get ruined.

They were temporarily homeless, while the landlord and real estate agent “got away with it” and continued to rent out the house.

Lucas, meanwhile, described the futility of trying to negotiate with property managers who would not respond to maintenance requests, meaning he had to put up with “untenable” housing:

There’s definitely been times where I’ve just felt like, all I have to do is grit my teeth and take it. Because otherwise, I’m just gonna lose.

Sharing as a source of both solidarity and conflict

Housemate relationships are at the heart of sharehousing.

One positive aspect of these relationships is that they may help build solidarity when experiencing problems with housing quality or other conflicts with the property manager.

One participant, Sarah, told of how her housemate successfully secured compensation from their property manager after the landlord started major renovations while she and her housemates were still living there. Seeing her housemate gain compensation enabled her to do the same.

On the other hand, relationships with housemates can complicate attempts to achieve justice.

Stacey, another interviewee, reported how efforts to negotiate with a property manager eventually led to “internal conflict within the house”, and how one housemate became hostile during the process.

Another interviewee, Tayler, also experienced problems with a landlord who was also his housemate, which intensified the conflict.

One participant, Jess, had also experienced domestic violence from a housemate.

I had to, I left before the lease was up. Like I moved back in with my parents because it was so bad. But I continued paying rent because […] I just didn’t want to deal with the further consequences of that.

While Jess was able to move out in this scenario, others described how this wasn’t possible due to a shortage of affordable housing. For example, Janet described how she’d prefer to move out rather than confront a housemate, but didn’t always have the option:

I’ve only left when I’ve had the capacity to do so. Often I’ve had to stay quite a lot longer than I would have liked to, because [I] don’t have the option to move, can’t afford it or nothing available.

Relationships and regulations

Regulations surrounding renters and landlords are framed in a way that assumes there are two parties in a dispute: the tenant and the property owner.

This renders the relationships within sharehousing invisible. Yet, there is clear evidence they impact the way tenancy disputes are managed and addressed.

For example, one interviewee named May was invited to move into a sharehouse by her friend. However, the friend’s property manager said May could not move in if she brought her cat (which is illegal in Victoria).

This shows how sharehousing depends on relationships between housemates and relationships with the property manager. May was aware of the need to put up with this to secure housing:

renters aren’t in a position of power. So, you kind of have to play the game just to have a roof over your head.

Relationships matter when we think about renting problems. While this research focused on sharehousing, there are implications for other renter households especially where conflict or even family or intimate partner violence occur.

Our future research will look at possible policy solutions to better capture the nuances of sharehousing in Australia.

Zoe Goodall, Research Associate, HHAUS research group, Swinburne University of Technology and Deb Batterham, Postdoctoral research fellow, Swinburne University of Technology

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

“Is there any way we can screw him?” asked President Richard M. Nixon.

“We’ve been trying to,” an aide replied, alluding to the White House’s efforts to remove from the airwaves an ABC talk show host whose critiques of the administration had placed that “son of a b—h” on the chief executive’s enemies list.

Over 50 years ago, Nixon and his team sought to use the full weight of the federal government – with calls to network executives, Federal Communications Commission complaints, IRS audits and FBI investigations – to silence “The Dick Cavett Show.”

Cavett, who seemed to personify the liberalism that Nixon despised, had drawn the president’s ire by platforming anti-war activists like John Kerry and Jane Fonda, along with left-wing radicals such as Stokely Carmichael.

Nixon ultimately failed in his attempt to silence Cavett. ABC executives were committed to independent media, while the broadcasting industry as a whole had garnered the attention and trust of an enormous audience, which insulated them from political pressure.

It’s a sharp contrast to President Donald Trump’s second term, during which he has loudly announced his desire to rid the nation’s televisions of his critics, and is making headway in doing so. In July 2025, CBS announced the cancellation of Stephen Colbert’s late night show. While the network maintained this was “purely a financial decision” based on ratings, it came in the wake of Colbert mocking both the president and the network.

“I hear Kimmel is next,” Trump crowed in the days after. Lo and behold, ABC briefly suspended Jimmy Kimmel on Sept. 17 over comments the comedian made about the response to the murder of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk. The suspension was lifted five days later, after it generated widespread backlash and became a flash point for free speech debates in the U.S.

But why has Trump been able to shake up late-night TV in ways Nixon never could?

It’s tempting to think of the network era – those decades in the 20th century when CBS, NBC and ABC dominated television – as a golden age of independent broadcasting and free expression.

However, as political historians of media, we know from our research that TV has always been a battleground of politics, business interests and broadcasting ideals.

The apparent appeasement of Trump by network executives shows just how much has changed in both the media and regulatory landscape since Nixon’s time.

Television’s decline

Direct pressure from the White House was the immediate catalyst for ABC’s decision to briefly pull the plug on Kimmel.

Brendan Carr, the chair of the FCC, threatened ABC and its affiliates while speaking on the podcast of right-wing commentator Benny Johnson.

“These companies can find ways to change conduct to take action on Kimmel,” he said, “or, you know, there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.” Soon, Nexstar and Sinclair, which own dozens of ABC affiliates, announced that they would pull the show, forcing ABC to act.

That said, network television’s fading place in the American media ecosystem probably made the call a whole lot easier.

When Nixon was trying to nix “The Dick Cavett Show,” the program averaged 5 million viewers a night. The rival “Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson” regularly pulled in 11 million viewers.

Yet even Cavett’s relatively smaller audience is more than double what Kimmel and his colleagues in late night television can count on today.

The rise of cable loosened the networks’ chokehold on TV news and entertainment in the late 20th century. The internet – followed by the advent of podcasts, streaming and social media – merely accelerated this trend.

By the 2010s, more viewers were watching clips of late night talk shows on their phones and computers than on television. Today, over 40% of people under 30 say they don’t watch broadcast or cable TV.

Kimmel does have over 20 million subscribers on YouTube and millions more on social media, but ABC has struggled to monetize this following.

In short, late night is no longer the TV crown jewel it once was. As a result, it’s far easier for executives to decide to cut the cord on a Kimmel or a Colbert.

Deregulation and consolidation

Broadcasting has always been a business where those at the top are swayed by the bottom line.

But back in Cavett’s day, top decision-makers at the networks were still dyed-in-the-wool broadcasting executives. Leonard Goldenson, the president of ABC whom Nixon’s aides hounded, had created the network from scratch and was invested in the ideals of independent media. Over at CBS, founder William S. Paley had spent decades building the network’s brand and reputation and held similar beliefs. They wanted to shield the respectability of their networks, which made them more resolute when confronted with political attacks.

Now, however, the ultimate decisions about what happens at ABC and CBS are made by executives at the megacorporations that own them.

Decades of deregulation – in particular, the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which spurred a wave of media mergers and consolidation – have allowed broadcasting today to be dominated by a handful of massive conglomerates. They own not only the networks, but also studios, cable channels and internet services.

These media giants need government approval to further expand their empires. This includes the US$8 billion merger that made Paramount Skydance the owner of CBS in summer 2025 – a deal that was approved just a week after CBS announced the cancellation of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.” Disney, which owns ABC, also has major deals pending that require the government’s go-ahead.

If the ultimate goal is ever-increasing profits for shareholders, getting rid of a late night show may seem like a small price to pay – especially if a particular program threatens the government’s sign-off on a massive deal.

Charging ‘liberal bias’

The decline of ratings and media consolidation has left television more vulnerable to attempts at political intimidation than ever before.

Trump is far from the first conservative to use the television networks as a political punching bag. His strategy of tarring national broadcasters with the brush of “liberal media bias” can be traced back to right-wing media activists who, as early as the 1940s, argued that the mainstream media shut out conservative ideas and voices.

Nixon, convinced that the nation’s television industry was against him, brought those tactics to the White House. In public, he relied on his vice president, Spiro Agnew, to slam the networks as part of an irresponsibly hostile liberal “unelected elite” with “vast power.” In private, Nixon abused the office of the presidency to harass and intimidate broadcasting reporters, directors and executives.

These tactics largely failed. But in Nixon’s wake, partisan media activists like former Fox News executive Roger Ailes and radio host Rush Limbaugh continued to popularize the idea of “liberal media bias” within the conservative movement.

Today, Trump’s charges of “liberal bias” or “fake news” galvanize his supporters – and make media executives sweat – because they’re a key part of modern right-wing identity.

But the president’s no-holds-barred approach is unprecedented. By threatening broadcasting licenses, instigating investigations and filing lawsuits – all while declaring the mainstream media “the enemy of the people” – Trump has turned the dial up to 11.

His administration’s success in temporarily getting Kimmel off the air is obviously one more chapter in an ongoing crisis for free speech. Unfortunately, given the trends in the relationship between American media and politics over the past half-century, it likely won’t be the last.

Sage Meredith Goodwin, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for American Political History and Technology, Purdue University and Oscar Winberg, Postdoctoral Fellow, Turku Institute for Advanced Studies & John Morton Center for North American Studies, University of Turku

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The foreign policy performances on both sides of politics currently have a dash of the amateur hour about them.

Anthony Albanese has seemingly again received the brush off, after months of diplomatic effort to secure a bilateral meeting with Donald Trump on the sidelines of the United Nations leaders’ week in New York.

The prime minister was not on the list of leaders, announced by the White House, with whom the president has bilaterals during his brief time in New York, where he addresses the UN General Assembly.

The Australians say, variously, a meeting will occur soon, or, no matter if it doesn’t happen (sub-text: an encounter with Trump is always a potential hazard anyway).

Some in the Australian camp have not written off the possibility of a meeting time still emerging this week. For what it’s worth, Acting Prime Minister Richard Marles declares a meeting will be “at some point in the near future”.

Nobody can predict Trump or his chaotic White House. But as things stand, the first Albanese-Trump face-to-face encounter unfortunately remains a matter of outstanding business.

The Australian PM does need to establish a personal relationship with Trump (and a handshake at a very large reception, if that happens, is no substitute).

While the government insists that on the important fronts, including AUKUS and tariffs, things are okay between the US and Australia, Lowy Institute executive director, Michael Fullilove, has described the relationship as “presently quite thin”, given the lack of a meeting (and the fact that as yet no US ambassador has been appointed to Canberra).

Fullilove said ahead of the Albanese trip, “the main priority for Mr Albanese when he meets with President Trump will be to thicken up the relationship”.

After a planned meeting in Canada fell through, Australian government sources and the prime minister himself talked up the opportunity this UN week would present.

A likely meeting certainly seemed imminent when the president, in attacking ABC correspondent John Lyons last week, suggested he’d soon see Albanese. “Your leader is coming over to see me very soon. I’m going to tell him about you,” Trump said.

It’s anyone’s guess why Albanese is not on the announced New York schedule. It could be the president is too busy and the claims of other leaders are more pressing. Or that he is dismissing Albanese for the moment, for any one of a number of reasons.

Of course Trump is critical of Australia recognising Palestine, but then, so has the United Kingdom and that’s not affected Trump’s positive relationship with UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer. The Palestinian question is one of the major issues Albanese is pursuing this week. He told the Two State Solution Conference at the UN, “we must break this cycle of violence”.

Perhaps Trump doesn’t rate Australia highly enough to go out of his way to accord it any special respect, seeing it as just that useful country down under.

Whatever the diplomatic implication, another failed date night wouldn’t do Albanese any harm domestically. Australians are, for the most part, anti-Trump.

But that should not be the measure. What’s more relevant is that we are, strategically, in a highly uncertain region, elevating the importance of trying to understand where the US is at.

Reinforcing the point, Albanese has had two recent failures diplomatically. A proposed $500 million deal with Vanuatu fell over and, more significantly, the prime minister was unable to sign a much talked-up defence deal with Papua New Guinea. The government says it is confident the PNG agreement will be signed soon, but delay always opens the possibility of slippage and the Chinese are urging PNG not to sign it.

Three diplomatic misses in as many weeks? Not a good look.

Meanwhile at home, it wasn’t surprising Sussan Ley reiterated a Coalition government would withdraw recognition from Palestine.

What was surprising was that Ley reached out directly to the 25 members of the US Congress who had written to Albanese and other leaders objecting to their countries’ recognition.

Ley said in her letter the recognition “does not enjoy bipartisan support here in Australia. The Federal Opposition opposes this decision.”

“It is also important to note it does not reflect the view of a majority of Australians,” she wrote.

“According to the reputable Resolve Political Monitor, just 24 per cent of Australians support recognising Palestine at the United Nations General Assembly. 44 per cent of Australians do not support changing Australia’s previously longstanding and bipartisan position on the recognition of a Palestinian state. 32 per cent of Australians believe recognition should only occur once Hamas is removed from power and when Palestinians recognise Israel’s right to exist.”

Ley’s letter breaks the convention (which admittedly some reject as old-fashioned) of keeping the arguments about foreign policy on home ground – the so-called dictum that “politics stops at the water’s edge”. Ley looks to be venturing onto to foreign soil, figuratively speaking, to play domestic politics.

For its part, the Israeli government has been quick this week to wade into Australia’s internal partisan politics. The Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar contacted Ley to talk about the recognition, and bilateral relations between Australia and Israel.

The Middle East conflict continues to produce ever-widening fractures in Australian politics and the Australian community.

Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

United States President Donald Trump is well advanced in his systematic campaign to undermine the American media and eviscerate its function of holding him and others in power to account.

Since the late 18th century this function has often been called the fourth estate. It’s the idea the media is a watchdog over the other three estates which, in modern democracies, are parliament, the executive government and the judiciary.

In the US, Trump has had considerable success in weakening the other three.

His Republican Party controls both Houses of Congress, and they have shown no sign of wishing to restrain him.

He has stacked the executive government with cronies and ideological fellow travellers, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr (and his anti-vaccination agenda) as secretary of health, a brief stint by Elon Musk as head of the Department of Government Efficiency, and former Fox News host Pete Hegseth as defence secretary.

He has secured the support of the Republican Party to stack the Supreme Court with politically aligned judges who have routinely struck down lower court decisions against Trump, most notably in the matter of deporting migrants to countries other than their homelands.

Pulling funding, applying pressure

The fourth estate’s turn started in March, when Trump stripped federal funding from Voice of America, a public broadcasting service with a global reach, because it was “anti-Trump” and “radical”.

These cuts also hit two other projections of American soft power, Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia.

In July, he cut funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) in a move that ended all federal support for National Public Radio, the Public Broadcasting service and their member stations.

Now he has turned to the private sector media. He does not have the power to cut their funding, so he is taking a different approach: financial shake-downs and threats to the foundations of their business.

In October 2024, even before he was elected, Trump sued the Paramount company for US$10 billion (about A$15 billion). He alleged an interview with Kamala Harris during the 2024 election campaign had been “deceptively edited” by the CBS television network, a Paramount subsidiary.

In February 2025, after he had been sworn in as president, Trump upped the ante to US$20 billion (A$30 billion).

The case was considered by lawyers to have no legal merit, but at that time, Paramount was anxious to merge with Skydance Media, and this was subject to regulatory approval from the Trump administration.

So Paramount was vulnerable to, how shall we say? Blackmail? Extortion? Subornation?

A busy, dangerous July

On July 2, Paramount settled with Trump for US$16 million (A$24 million), which ostensibly is to go towards funding his presidential library.

On July 17 Paramount’s CBS network announced its longtime Late Show would be cancelled from May 2026 after its presenter Stephen Colbert, an outspoken critic of Trump, condemned the corporate cave-in. The Trump administration approved the merger shortly after.

Subsequently the House of Representatives Judiciary and Energy and Commerce committees announced an investigation into whether the $16 million settlement constituted a bribe.

Also in July, Trump sued Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal for defamation arising from an article linking Trump to the sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. He claimed the now-familiar amount of US$10 billion (A$15 billion) in damages.

Legal experts in the US say Trump has next to no chance of winning. In the US, public figures who sue for defamation have to prove that the publisher was motivated by malice, which means they published either knowing the material to be untrue, or not caring whether it was true or not.

This case is never likely to end up in court, nor is it likely that Trump will see a red cent of Murdoch’s money. The two men need each other too much. To borrow a phrase from the Cold War, they are in a MAD relationship: Mutually Assured Destruction.

Coming to heel, one by one

Rupert Murdoch was a guest at Windsor Castle at the recent banquet given for Trump by King Charles.

Considering Murdoch’s bitter history with the Royal Family, it is difficult to imagine Buckingham Palace inviting him without Trump’s urging. It may have been a sign of rapprochement between the two men.

Meanwhile Trump has set his sights on The New York Times, suing it for defamation and claiming US$15 billion (A$27 billion).

Referring to the Times’ endorsement of Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election, he said it had become a “mouthpiece for the Radical Left Democrat Party”.

This case faces the same difficulties as his suit against the Wall Street Journal. The question is whether the Times will stand its ground or whether, like Paramount, it caves.

Among the big three US newspapers, the Times is the only one so far not to have been intimidated by Trump. The other two, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, refused to endorse a candidate at the election on instructions from their owners, Jeff Bezos and Patrick Soon-Shiong respectively, both of whose wider business interests are vulnerable to Trumpian retribution.

The Post’s decision was condemned as “spineless” by its celebrated former editor Marty Baron.

Now Disney is in the firing line. It owns another of the big four US television networks, ABC. On September 17, it pulled its late-night talk show Jimmy Kimmel Live.

Kimmel had responded to White House accusations that leftists were responsible for the assassination of Charlie Kirk, saying:

we hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them.

In what had all the hallmarks of a preemptive buckle, ABC and two of its affiliate networks took Kimmel off air indefinitely after Brendan Carr, the Trump-appointed chair of the Federal Communications Commission, said his agency might “take action” against the network because of Kimmel’s comments.

Kimmel is returning to TV, but the damage is already done.

Over at cable network MSNBC, its senior political analyst Matthew Dowd was fired after he had uttered on air the blindingly obvious statement that Kirk’s own radical rhetoric may have contributed to the shooting that killed him.

This cable network is no longer part of the main NBC network, so it can’t be said that NBC itself has yet come to heel.

Within 24 hours of Brendan Carr’s veiled threat, Trump stripped the veil away and made the threat explicit. Trump said of the national networks:

All they do is hit Trump. They’re licensed, they’re not allowed to do that. They’re an arm of the Democrat party. I would think maybe their licence should be taken away.

Whether cancelling a licence would breach the First Amendment to the US Constitution, which protects freedom of speech, is a question that might ultimately come before the Supreme Court. Given the present ideological proclivities of that court, the outcome would be by no means certain.

So Trump now has two out of three national newspapers, and two out of the big four national television networks, on the run.

Only one national newspaper and two national networks to go, and one of those is Murdoch’s Fox News, Trump’s most reliable cheerleader.

Denis Muller, Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Advancing Journalism, The University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Most of the ordinary matter in the universe is hydrogen. But surprisingly, less than 20% of this hydrogen sits inside galaxies. The rest lies in the vast spaces between them – the so-called intergalactic medium.

This cosmic reservoir is thought to fuel the birth of new stars, as gas slowly falls into galaxies over billions of years. Yet much of that material doesn’t stay put: supernova explosions and powerful outflows from supermassive black holes can fling gas back out into intergalactic space.

The push-and-pull between inflows and outflows is central to understanding how galaxies grow and change over cosmic time. Probing this balance is one of the aims of the WALLABY survey, carried out using the Australian SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP) telescope at Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara, CSIRO’s Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory in Western Australia.

A new discovery from WALLABY, published today in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, sheds new light on the cosmic cycle of matter into, through and out of galaxies.

What is WALLABY?

Despite its name, WALLABY isn’t about animals. It’s a somewhat contrived acronym – Widefield ASKAP L-band Legacy All-sky Blind surveY – for a large survey of neutral hydrogen (the atomic form of hydrogen) across nearly half the southern sky. The ASKAP telescope is sensitive enough to detect hydrogen in and around galaxies up to a billion light years away.

Because it’s a “blind” survey, WALLABY doesn’t target known galaxies. Instead, it scans huge patches of sky – each night covering an area about 150 times the size of the full Moon.

A galactic bridge

We then use automated algorithms to search for signs of hydrogen in the resulting data. One such search revealed an unusual gas bridge linking two otherwise unremarkable galaxies on the outskirts of the Virgo cluster, in the constellation Virgo. The bridge, at least 160,000 light years long, likely formed through tidal interactions between two dwarf galaxies known as NGC 4532 and DDO 137.

These tides are the cosmic equivalent of Earth’s ocean tides, but on a vastly larger scale and made of hydrogen rather than water. Gas pulled from the galaxies now stretches between them, filling the surrounding intergalactic space.

Such bridges are hard to detect because they contain few stars. But we have a local example: the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, two dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way, are joined by a 70,000-light-year-long gas bridge.

An extraordinary tail

The newly discovered bridge also helps explain a long-standing puzzle: an enormous gas tail streaming away from the dwarf galaxies NGC 4532 and DDO 137, first detected more than 30 years ago with the Arecibo telescope. This tail is ten times longer than the bridge and is the largest ever observed from a galaxy system.

New observations suggest that while tidal forces created the bridge and the envelope of gas around the galaxies, the spectacular tail was produced by another process.

As the pair of galaxies plunges into the Virgo cluster, they encounter extremely hot, thin gas that fills the cluster. The galaxies’ motion through this medium produces ram pressure – much like the resistance felt when cycling into a strong headwind – which strips gas from them and sweeps it out behind.

Remarkably, the gas density required for this effect is only around ten atoms per cubic metre, a value consistent with new measurements from the eROSITA X-ray telescope. Thanks to the galaxies’ high infall speed – more than 800 kilometres per second – this sparse medium is enough to create the vast tail.

The bigger picture

These two galaxies are just a fraction of the 200,000 WALLABY expects to detect by the end of its survey. Each discovery adds to our picture of how gas flows in and out of galaxies, enriching the intergalactic medium and shaping galactic evolution.

Together, they will help astronomers untangle the so-called baryonic cycle – the continuous recycling of matter between galaxies and the space around them.

Lister Staveley-Smith, Professor at the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), The University of Western Australia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.