Former Australian foreign affairs minister Gareth Evans has called the Aukus nuclear submarine deal one of the worst defence decisions ever made, warning it effectively extends the US military fleet and paints a target on Australia's back. He expressed skepticism about delivery timelines and costs, particularly for the UK-Australia joint submarines.
Campaigners call for reform and public inquiry into royal finances after revelations about Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor's private income from subletting cottages
University of Wollongong Chancellor Michael Still stands aside pending ICAC inquiry into allegations involving senior staff, including recruitment practices and conflicts of interest.
Police recommended charges against 77 individuals and organizations for the Grenfell Tower fire. Survivors express mixed relief, grief, and anger over the lengthy process, with trials unlikely before 2028. Campaigners criticize slow progress and weak corporate manslaughter laws.
Elias Calocane, brother of Nottingham triple killer Valdo Calocane, told a public inquiry he feared his brother would take his own life, not realizing the threat to others, and felt powerless amid his brother's paranoid schizophrenia diagnosis in 2020.
Elias Calocane, brother of Nottingham triple killer Valdo Calocane, feared his brother would take his own life due to paranoid schizophrenia, a public inquiry heard.
Elias Calocane, brother of Nottingham triple killer Valdo Calocane, told a public inquiry he feared his brother would take his own life due to paranoid schizophrenia, but felt powerless to intervene.
A Hong Kong building inspector mistook illegal alterations to emergency staircases at a housing estate ravaged in a deadly fire as protective measures for “broken” windows, because he based his assessment solely on documents and did not carry out a site visit, a public inquiry has heard. Senior maintenance surveyor Nick Yung Siu-lun, the head of the minor works team of the Housing Bureau’s independent checking unit, said on Thursday he thought the wooden boards used to cover the temporary...
Government inspectors did not foresee engineering firms colluding to deceive authorities over the use of substandard renovation materials at a Hong Kong residential estate devastated in the city’s deadliest fire in decades, a public inquiry has heard. Andy Ku Siu-ping, a senior maintenance surveyor of the Housing Bureau’s Independent Checking Unit, on Wednesday blamed “systemic defects” for the body’s failure to rectify the use of flammable polyfoam boards and scaffolding mesh during a HK$336...
The independent committee tasked with investigating Hong Kong’s deadly Tai Po blaze has finished 21 sessions of evidential hearings in three rounds, pointing to multiple apparent loopholes in the supervision of the estate’s renovation project and the government’s regulation of fire hazards. The inferno broke out on November 26 last year when all eight blocks at Wang Fuk Court were undergoing exterior maintenance work and were covered in scaffolding and mesh netting. The fire tore through seven...
A former NHS nurse has told a public inquiry that Valdo Calocane, who killed three people in Nottingham in June 2023, 'deceived and out-manoeuvred' medical staff. Gary Carter, who was Calocane's care coordinator for five months in 2022, said the trust 'failed' to manage his care. Calocane had a history of not taking his medication and moved between addresses. He was discharged in September 2022 before the attacks that killed Barnaby Webber, Grace O'Malley-Kumar and Ian Coates.
An official tendering system designed to curb anti-competitive conduct is powerless to combat engineering firms colluding to manipulate Hong Kong’s lucrative building maintenance market, a public inquiry into the city’s deadliest fire in decades has heard. Testifying on the 21st day of an independent committee’s hearing, three Urban Renewal Authority (URA) officials said on Thursday that the statutory body had neither the capacity nor the resources to combat bid-rigging linked to estates’...
Canada is establishing a new Financial Crimes Agency (FCA) to investigate and prosecute financial crimes, completing the bill's first reading in parliament. The agency results from a public inquiry finding Canada lacked a cohesive anti-money laundering strategy. Canada will also ban cryptocurrency ATMs, of which it has nearly 4,000—the most per capita globally. The move contrasts sharply with US policy under the Trump administration, which pardoned convicted money launderers and shifted thousands of investigators away from financial crime.
Government surveyors failed to detect major fire risks at a housing complex destroyed in Hong Kong’s deadliest inferno in decades because they were following outdated guidelines that did not require in-person inspections of renovation works, a public inquiry has heard. The independent committee was told on Monday that illegal alterations to Wang Fuk Court’s emergency passages during the HK$336 million (US$42.9 million) overhaul of the estate’s exterior could have been discovered sooner had...
An independent committee investigating the deadly November fire at Wang Fuk Court in Tai Po, Hong Kong, heard that the emergency mobile phone alert system would have taken up to an hour to activate and would have offered little help to fire services. The blaze killed 168 people — the deadliest in Hong Kong since 1948 — and displaced nearly 5,000 residents. The inquiry revealed that a property management employee accidentally disabled fire alarms while switching off hosepipes for repairs, and suggested five of seven affected towers caught fire at a late enough stage that evacuation might have been possible.
A public inquiry into Hong Kong’s deadliest fire in decades has exposed confusion among government departments over their roles in supervising large renovation projects, with a fire services officer insisting his department is not responsible for handling complaints about flammable building materials because it lacks expertise in construction. Michael Yung Kam-hung, an assistant director of the Fire Services Department, said on Wednesday it did not take legal action over breaches discovered...
Former management committee member Jason Kong Cheung-fat exposes proxy vote abuse at Wang Fuk Court in Tai Po, where a November 2025 fire killed 168 people — the deadliest in Hong Kong since 1948. The HK$336 million renovation contract was awarded to Prestige Construction and Engineering in January 2024 after 570 votes were cast at a meeting attended by only 293 people, with homeowners forced to pay up to HK$180,000 per flat within six months.
A UK public inquiry concluded that state bodies, including police and the Prevent counter-radicalization scheme, failed to recognize the risk posed by Axel Rudakubana, leading to the preventable murders of three young girls at a Taylor Swift-themed event in Southport in 2024.
