While you are struggling to pay your bills, this is what the Albanese Labor government is spending your money on on: Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen has spent more than $6m on ritzy hotel ­accommodation around the world in just a few months, ­including two bookings of $2m each for his pre-COP31 meetings in Fiji which have been panned by critics after a series of high-profile snubs. Meanwhile, DCCEEW records also disclosed $283,976 for Mr Bowen’s trip to Bonn, Germany, for a booking at Living Hotel Kanzler for just six days from June 7 to 12. The Daily Telegraph revealed last month Mr Bowen slugged taxpayers more than $340,000 to travel the world to spruik his net-zero ambitions, spending an ­average of $7500 a day on travel across a grand total of 46 days abroad.

Global Prayer Defies China’s Escalating War on Christians More than 6,000 believers from Japan, South Korea, the United States, Australia, and beyond joined a global prayer gathering on August 9, 2026, at Living Jesus Church in Osaka and online. ChinaAid President Bob Fu outlined four intensifying trends of persecution under the CCP’s “Sinicization” policy: dismantling major house churches such as Early Rain and Beijing Zion, criminalizing ordinary worship and collecting biometric data, labeling entire congregations criminal organizations, and extending repression overseas through surveillance and intimidation. Pastor Yang Jun shared the pain of his wife’s imprisonment and family separation while urging prayer for the “Zion 8.” The monthly fasting-and-prayer movement calls the worldwide church to stand with them. #PersecutedChurchChina# #PrayForChina# #ReligiousFreedom# #ChinaAid# #HouseChurchResilience#

A man in his 40s finds himself still living at home with his overbearing mother. Whenever he comes close to meeting a girl he might consider settling down with, his mother always manages to mess up the relationship. Her excuse is that no girl is good enough for her precious son. As the years tick by, he eventually realizes that unless he does something soon, he will end up living at home forever, so one evening he gets up the courage to announce: “Mother, I have fallen in love and intend on getting married. I’m going to bring three ladies to the house tomorrow evening, and you have to guess which one I’m going to marry.” The mother is deeply unimpressed, but agrees to it, and so the following evening the son brings three attractive women into the living room and asks them to sit down on the sofa. “Right,” he says to his mother, “which of these young ladies do you think is the one that I’m going to marry?” Without hesitation, the mother pointer finger and replies: “The one in the middle.” “That’s right,” says the son. “How did you know?” The mother replies, “Because I don’t like her!”

The Lost World at the Bottom of the Deepest Hole on Earth Drop the Empire State Building into the ground, and it would vanish without a trace. That's the scale of the Xiaozhai Tiankeng — a 662-meter wound in the limestone karst of Chongqing, China, the deepest sinkhole on the planet. It wasn't dug. It collapsed. Hundreds of thousands of years ago, the roof of an enormous underground cavern gave way, and the earth simply fell in on itself — twice. The result is a double-nested abyss: an upper bowl plunging 320 meters to a sloping terrace, which then drops another 342 meters into the pit. Stand at the rim and you're staring into a geological Russian doll. But the part that sounds like fiction: at the bottom, there's a forest. A primeval one. The sinkhole's sheer vertical cliffs act like the walls of a thermos — blocking cold winds, trapping humidity — while an underground river runs eight kilometers beneath the floor, breathing moisture up into the chasm. The result is a warm, eerily stable microclimate: a natural greenhouse sealed off from the world above. Inside it, more than 1,280 documented plant species thrive. Towering trees stretch dozens of meters toward the distant rim. Among them grow living fossils — the dove tree, the Chinese yew, wild ginkgoes — ancient relict species that survived the ice ages here while their cousins outside perished. Rare ferns and thick moss carpets cover the limestone floor. And it isn't just plants. Clouded leopards prowl the understory. Leopard cats, Asian black bears, and masked palm civets move through the green dark below, while swallows nest in cities along the rock faces. A whole ecosystem — predators, prey, and thousand-year-old trees — living at the bottom of a hole, in a climate of its own making, that almost no one will ever see. The planet keeps its best secrets underground.

TBC is excited to announce the first residential Music City Loop station agreement, serving those living at the beautiful Prime, Alcove, and Paramount towers in downtown Nashville. Residents will take an elevator directly to a Loop station within the building, board a Tesla, and be at the airport in ~9 minutes or Lower Broadway in ~2 minutes.

I head the Market Access department at Truth Social, even though that is just another way of saying that I'm selling the head start. I provide the President with free access to 340 million Americans. I sell the ten seconds before the post to ten companies at a rate of $100,000 a month each, and the only thing I have ever needed to sell is the gap between those two figures. For most of the thirty years before I came to be here, I sold this service on Wall Street under forty different names. The name that I now use is the Truth API, and it is the most honest title that the business has ever had, and I'll explain why in a moment. People are always referring to this as corruption. I'm going to show you, step by step, why it isn't, since I happen to enjoy doing so and because my lawyers required me to memorise the terminology. Begin with the part that is solid. The President is not engaging in any form of sale. He publishes free of charge, for all people, at every hour, out of a love that I can only describe in those terms. The man cannot stop telling you precisely what he is about to do to the world. I do not sell his words; his words are free. I sell the gap between his words and your eyes, and that gap has never been free in this country, not a single time, not for anything deserving of being crossed. However, it is a mistake to think that this started with him; someone has always been the one to sell the head start. Thirty years ago I disposed of a server. Not the server itself, but the position: my client's order reached the matching engine a few millionths of a second before the rest of the market became aware that an order was in existence because the cage was 40 feet closer to the exchange's matching engine than yours. The exchange paid me for the distance. I charged a premium for it. No one regarded that as corruption. They called it colocation and included it in a brochure. Twenty years ago I sold two seconds; a research organisation gave the nation's consumer-confidence figure to its paying elite two seconds before giving it to the general public, and in that two seconds a quick desk could turn a coin toss into a definite decision. I also sold those two seconds. I have sold the lockup room, in which reporters hold the job report behind glass until the clock hits and a pipe that works quickly turns the embargo into a starting gun. I have sold the analyst's note before it appeared in print. I have sold my proximity to those who draw up the laws and then buy the companies which are the subject of those laws, and when they were caught they passed a law bearing their own name on it and continued to trade, and I kept on selling. People always manage to secure the head start. I am the most skilled at doing so that has ever existed, and the Truth API is my finest achievement since, for the first time, the source is no longer leaking, whispering, or arriving two seconds early; he is now shouting for free to everybody, and yet I am still able to charge one hundred thousand dollars a month for the ten seconds that come before the shout. If you want to call it a loophole, then call it one; I refer to it as artistry and I have the profit margins to win the argument. The point on which the critics are wrong is also the one for which I am most proud. They believe that a head start requires a crime, whereas it in fact requires the opposite. I have no use for a liar since he is unpredictable and I don't sell surprises. All I sell is certainty accompanied by a timestamp. His conviction constitutes my inventory. All I need to do is stand next to the loudest man living at the moment he exhales, and by so doing I have made the square foot next to him the most expensive in the world. See how much the exhalation is worth. He announces that Iran has agreed to delay. The price of oil falls by $4 a barrel before the wire desk has finished phoning the Pentagon. My subscribers are already in long positions. You pick this up from a push notification. They found out from the lungs. He announces that the tariffs are on hold. The market increases by nearly $1 trillion within the course of an afternoon. Now he has the role of the weather, so I sell the one umbrella that opens before the rain falls. Corruption is a favour carried out in the dark. I carry out my favours through a subscription portal, using a dashboard, a rate card, and a customer-success manager called Brandon who sends you a fruit basket as soon as your funds clear the first $1 billion from the feed. They took legal action against me, of course. A press foundation and a magazine, being very serious about it, described the situation as corrupt and unconstitutional in the headline. That headline resulted in the best sales week of my career. Nothing sells a table like a velvet rope and a judge standing beside it. This is exactly the point that I have been working towards in my entire speech, so I want you to imagine yourself in it. A head start is of no use if nobody is staying put. You can't have a fast side without a slow side to compare with. And you have already decided, in a comfortable manner, that the slow side is a pension fund in a state you have never been to. It is you. Throughout your life you've always been the slower part in a fast-paced trade. The layoff—that your vice president became aware of in March and you found out about in June. The increase in rent that took place the month the building changed hands, even though no one had informed the tenants weeks earlier. The plant closing the week after the executives had quietly sold it. The diagnosis code that your insurance company had already priced before your doctor had said the word out loud. You regarded all of this as bad luck. It was a product and it had a department; I manage that department. A shop teacher who has now retired, aged 71, has one entry on page 30 of the pension fund and each Sunday morning checks his balance while having a cup of coffee, since on that day the market does not move and he is able to look at it without feeling any anxiety. In the best month of my career, the month when oil prices reached $90 as a result of the blockade, he awoke on a Sunday poorer than he had been on Saturday by an amount greater than the sum he had earned in his final full year as a teacher, and he never managed to work out which sentence had caused it. He did not receive an alert because alerts are a paid feature; he obtained the figure in the same way that the slower side always does, in a complete and finished form and far too late to be anything but a matter of arithmetic, at the speed of a citizen, that is to say, the speed of last. Once a child who was sitting on my desk asked me whether it kept me awake. I explained to him that everybody receives the same messages. He replied to his screen without looking up, "They receive them only after it's all over; the delay is the result. You just don't include it on the invoice." After that he entered his figure for the quarter and stopped asking, just as all the others do, just as I stopped asking, just as you will stop reading this in a minute and go to check your own balance. My own money is in a blind trust. I never trade on any of it, and here is the beautiful part: I do not have to. I sell shovels to a gold rush, and the shovel never has to find a single flake of gold. It only has to reach the dirt first. I have gotten quietly, enormously rich standing perfectly still, in daylight, with my name on the door. All Americans have the freedom to hear the President's words, and the ten seconds prior to them cost $100,000 a month and are increasing, since there is no upper limit to the amount a person will pay in order to cease being a citizen. All people pick up the news, with someone always being the first to do so; someone is always the one to capitalise on that early advantage, and the only difference in thirty years is that at last I've discovered a source loud enough to be able to sell the silence that comes before him and charge for it as a subscription. There is a level higher than the one that I deal in. Although I have not been authorized to find out how much it costs, I know that it exists, that someone whom you'll never meet is already paying that price, and that on the day it becomes publicly known you'll see about it right here for free, many months after it has stopped being relevant. At the speed of the previous one.

Wildfires, damaging waves and beach erosion are testing the enduring appeal, and extraordinary prices, of living at the edge of the Pacific. @franmagliones breaks down the disaster risks the residents of Malibu face

"A few hundred thousand years ago, in early human prehistory, growth was so slow that it took on the order of one million years for human productive capacity to increase sufficiently to sustain an additional one million individuals living at subsistence level. By 5000 BC, following the Agricultural Revolution, the rate of growth had increased to the point where the same amount of growth took just two centuries. Today, following the Industrial Revolution, the world economy grows on average by that amount every 90 minutes. Even the present rate of growth will produce impressive results if maintained for a moderately long time. If the world economy continues to grow at the same pace as it has over the past fifty years, then the world will be some 4.8 times richer by 2050 and about 34 times richer by 2100 than it is today. Yet the prospect of continuing on a steady exponential growth path pales in comparison to what would happen if the world were to experience another step change in the rate of growth comparable in magnitude to those associated with the Agricultural Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. The economist Robin Hanson estimates, based on historical economic and population data, a characteristic world economy doubling time for Pleistocene hunter-gatherer society of 224,000 year; for farming society, 909 years; and for industrial society, 6.3 years. If another such transition to a different growth mode were to occur, and it were of similar magnitude to the previous two, it would result in a new growth regime in which the world economy would double in size about every two weeks" — Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence