Hundreds of climate activists, aboard rafts and kayaks, have paddled out into the Port of Newcastle for a so-called “protestival”, to disrupt the world’s largest coal port. The activists behind the protest, Rising Tide, are defying a police-sought court order that tried to have the protest stopped due to safety concerns – meaning the demonstration will run in the presence of a police force that has a full suite of powers.

Today, Cheyne Anderson on how challenges like this are becoming more common, set against a backdrop of a nation-wide crackdown on the right to protest.

At Sydney Airport on a muggy night in 2022, a group of volunteers from Sydney’s northern beaches wait to greet a family of refugees they had never met. They’re part of an ambitious new pilot program in which a sponsoring community acts as the safety net for refugees rather than government-funded services. But two years on, the program’s successes are hitting constraints.

Today, Cheyne Anderson on whether the experiment is a sustainable pathway to settlement, or a shortcut to positive government PR.

Smut Clyde spends several hours every day, scouring online science journals for suspicious-looking research. He’s part of a growing team of online ‘science sleuths’, combating the rising number of fake research papers being published.

Today, Cheyne Anderson on how this epidemic of fraudulent research is infecting the scientific record.