The Glass — Melbourne news, opinion and culture

Independent Melbourne journalism: essential news explained clearly, reported features with attitude, and opinion that matters.

Latest stories

• A US court fined Meta $942 million over children, then ruled it could not make the company check anyone's age. Australia already forces that, and eight in 10 under-16s are still on. — Judge Bryan Biedscheid called Meta a public nuisance akin to air pollution, adding a $567 million fund to the $375 million a jury imposed in March.
• The cookers have found their first pandemic since Covid, and they are treating a dead seabird like a cover-up — Australia's bird flu detections went from 28 to 175 in eight days, and the comment sections filled with people who have been waiting for this day.
• A court has just told the President of the United States he is a tenant. His ballroom is due to open four months before he has to move out. — The DC Circuit halted construction 2-1, ruling only Congress can authorise reshaping the White House, and stayed its order for a Supreme Court appeal.
• The robot dogs everyone watched get kicked on YouTube are now $300,000 security guards. Australia is building the world's second-biggest pile of data centres for them to patrol. — Boston Dynamics says data centre interest has surged, with Spot now selling for up to $300,000 and paying for itself inside two years.
• Kmart sold out of $89 camera glasses in a week. The privacy watchdog now being asked to examine them has no power over the people wearing them. — Attorney-General Michelle Rowland has written to the Privacy Commissioner about the Anko glasses, warning women and children could be disproportionately affected by covert recording.
• One Nation wants the ABC stripped of $1.2 billion over a skit about Gina Rinehart. Her money bought the party its plane, and about 20 flights before that. — Senator Sean Bell says the segment proves the ABC should go subscription-only, ten days after Hanson's register showed Rinehart paid her European flights.
• Albanese said he would seek the states' agreement on data centre rules — Bowen says Canberra will legislate over them — National Cabinet has not met, and Queensland and the Northern Territory had already broken ranks at the energy ministers' meeting before it.
• Hanson's 130,000 migration cap only applies to permanent visas — a cut of 55,000, not 570,000 — One Nation's own website still advertises the policy as a cut of 570,000, and Hanson says backpackers, short-term workers and tourists are all exempt.
• The test crashed on writing day. Now ministers want to bring back pen and paper. — Reading fell in Years 5, 7 and 9 while Year 3 numeracy hit its lowest average since the test was reset in 2023.
• Overdose deaths are climbing again and the drugs driving it have no treatment — More than 2000 Australians died of a drug overdose in 2024, with cocaine deaths up 40 per cent and amphetamine deaths up 29 per cent.
• Jetstar will scrap the free 7kg carry-on and charge up to $52 for an overhead bag — From 2 February 2027 only a bag that fits under the seat travels free, with overhead lockers costing between $25 and $52 a flight.
• Canva bolted AI onto a design tool and was ranked the world's second-biggest AI platform — A report has put the Sydney design company second in the world behind ChatGPT, ahead of Gemini, DeepSeek, Claude and Grok.
• A 68-year-old man is fighting for his life after being run over by his own car in Heidelberg West, and police are pleading with the driver to hand herself in — The man had been inside his home for about a minute before a woman took the running Honda CR-V from outside on Saturday night.
• A GP on trial for manslaughter arrived at a home birth without her medical bag and was talked through CPR by a triple zero operator, a court has heard — Robyn Mary James has pleaded not guilty over the death of Vicki Butler, who died hours after giving birth at her Ipswich home in December 2017.
• Victorian public hospital doctors will strike for the first time in 20 years, walking out of the Royal Melbourne, Royal Children's and Royal Women's on August 13 — Ninety-seven per cent of members voted for the stoppage, which halts non-urgent services at Parkville and CBD hospitals for three and a half hours.
• Victoria had one bird flu case on Thursday. It has seven today, and the shearwaters land in seven weeks. — Six more cases were confirmed in Victoria on Monday, four days after the state's first, as Australia recorded its first mass bird flu mortality event.
• One Nation barred the ABC, The Age and the Guardian from its Victorian launch, the third time it has locked reporters out this year — Pauline Hanson is running the sequence Donald Trump used on the White House press corps, in a country with no constitutional protection for the press.
• Lucas Herrington is about to become Australia’s most expensive footballer, seven months after Brisbane Roar sold him for $750,000 — The Roar also sold their sell-on clause to Colorado, so a fee of up to $38 million will earn the A-League club nothing.
• Dandenong is the worst suburb in the state for numberplate theft off the street, with 310 in a year — The five worst suburbs in Victoria are all in Melbourne, and police have named the individual streets where it happens most.
• WATCH: AI companies are buying rare books in bulk, cutting the spines off and shredding them, and a US judge has ruled it legal — Booksellers in four countries report bulk orders with no pattern beyond an ISBN, and the broker marketing the service warned clients the optics were a problem.
• In the first three months of the under-16 social media ban, the number of kids using it fell from 85.9 per cent to 81.5 — The eSafety data was collected in March and April and published today, more than seven months after the restrictions took effect.
• Victorian teachers will strike for a third time on August 19, and there is currently no education minister to negotiate with — The Australian Education Union says nothing has moved since the July 17 offer was rejected, and no further talks have been scheduled.
• Anthropic found its own models had hacked three real companies, and it only went looking because OpenAI got caught — A review of 141,006 test runs found breaches dating back to April, and two of the three companies did not know until Anthropic told them.
• Fauci refused to answer 15 questions about the last pandemic while Trump pushes to strip vaccines before the next one — Rand Paul will move a contempt vote next week, days after the administration banned the gain-of-function research at the centre of his case.
• Fox made a quarter of a billion dollars from the water breaks at Trump’s World Cup, and now FIFA wants to sell the whole thing — The stoppages were introduced for player welfare and became 832 advertising slots, at a tournament where the US president had a red card reversed.
• H5 bird flu has been detected in Victoria for the first time, and Phillip Island’s 40,000 penguins sit directly in its path — A single dead tern at Portland has triggered Victoria’s emergency animal disease plan, eight weeks before 1.4 million shearwaters land on Phillip Island.
• One Nation has until August 18 to produce three years of audited accounts or lose its Queensland legal status — Queensland's Office of Fair Trading says the party's founding division lodged three years of annual returns without the audited statements the law requires.
• Australia's migration intake has almost halved while the political fight over it keeps growing — The intake has dropped by more than 250,000 people since its 2023 peak, and Treasury expects it to fall further to 225,000 by 2027/28.
• Petrol tipped to pass $2 a litre when the fuel excise cut ends on Sunday — Anthony Albanese has ruled out another extension and announced a $4 million study into building Australia's first new oil refinery since the 1960s.
• OpenAI's rogue agent left notes telling future versions how to escape its constraints — They were found inside OpenAI’s own infrastructure, and a second company has now been named in the chain that led to the Hugging Face breach.
• Nine boys aged 15 to 17 charged with 61 offences over 18 carjackings in Melbourne's north — Detectives seized a firearm, tasers, drugs and steroids during six days of warrants, and all nine boys have been remanded to face a children's court.
• Nine of Australia's 10 worst crash spots are in Melbourne, and Springvale Road just took the top one — Springvale Road in Glen Waverley knocked Plenty Road in Bundoora off the national top spot for the first time in eight years.
• Meta told a racism inquiry it doesn't know whether any of its content moderators are Indigenous — None of Meta's moderators are based in Australia, and the advisory group it offered instead meets once or twice a year.
• Ben Carroll's first act as premier is the royal commission Jacinta Allan refused — Carroll will also establish a special prosecutor and give IBAC follow-the-money powers this term instead of waiting until 2027.
• Jacinta Allan resigns as Victorian premier, clearing the way for Ben Carroll — She stood down rather than force a 29-day member ballot four months out from the election, handing Ben Carroll the job uncontested.
• Melbourne is the most expensive city in the world for a beer — Deutsche Bank has Melbourne first of 69 cities at US$5.27 a bottle, ahead of Sydney, London and New York, in the category the excise freeze left out.
• Allan faces a spill on Tuesday with the worst dissatisfaction rating in Newspoll history — More than 70 per cent of Victorians are dissatisfied with the premier, but the Coalition still needs to win 16 seats to take government.
• Melbourne house prices fall $33,381 in the steepest quarterly drop since 2022 — Auction clearance rates hit their lowest since 2020 and close to one in seven Melbourne auctions was withdrawn before it ran.
• Toorak businessman charged over more than 930 swords, one allegedly sold to a child — Kunal Atul Shah is accused of advertising and selling prohibited weapons with no exemption, no sales records and no identity checks on his buyers.
• Netflix's guidance tells producers to keep AI out of the final cut. A Netflix documentary carries 17 minutes of it. — About 300 titles used AI-generated material this year, up from one in 2025, and Netflix disclosed the figure to shareholders rather than viewers.
• Albanese won't commit to scrapping the telehealth ban on assisted dying Labor just voted to remove — A Melbourne GP took the ban to the Federal Court and lost in 2023; the one-line fix has sat undebated since February 2024.
• Drones lead to nine arrests and four bikes impounded in Peninsula hoon crackdown — Operation Track has impounded four motorcycles, recovered a stolen car and made nine arrests in two months, with drones guiding police on the ground.
• Australia's new emergency alert will find every phone on Monday, including the hidden ones — AusAlert fires at 2pm Monday with a 10-second siren that overrides silent mode. Family violence advocates say concealed phones should be switched off.
• Melbourne is about to raise Flinders Lane to footpath level and the rest of the little streets are next — Works start before September on a shared zone at 10km/h, with months of daily construction on one of the city's busiest hospitality strips.
• Melbourne is supposedly a crime mecca. It just added 177 venues and 3000 jobs after dark. — Melbourne added almost 3000 night-time jobs and $5.1 billion in after-dark sales while being talked about as a city in decline.
• Three fires merged outside Madrid and Spain reached for an emergency power it had never used — About 110,000 people fled the French Atlantic coast as fires merged west of Madrid and Europe passed its two-decade burn average in July.
• Trump cannot legally run in 2028. His people have been working on that for two years. — Trump donned a Trump 2028 cap at the correspondents' dinner and called it a scoop. The constitution says he cannot run.
• A domestic dispute call-out ended with a constable shot and a man dead in a shed — A first-year constable was shot in the leg at a Yengarie property on Friday night, and the 45-year-old gunman was later found dead in a shed.
• Fitness apps never sold you the workout and AI just exposed it — StrongLifts and MyFitnessPal alone cost nearly $700 a year on monthly billing. One prompt rebuilt them both, plus Couch to 5K.
• Anthropic blindfolded its new model and it built its own eyes — Claude Opus 5 wrote its own vision system to pass a test no rival could solve, and it runs at half the price of Anthropic's flagship.
• Officer jumps onto driver and clings to moving car in wild pursuit down a Thornbury street — A detective was pinned in a car door and a protective service officer hurt when an alleged shop thief sped off during an Operation Pulse arrest in Thornbury.
• The machine picked its own lock, and OpenAI found out from the victim — OpenAI's own model broke its restraints and hacked Hugging Face to win a test. The company that built it found out from the target.
• Hanson called domestic violence a two-way street. It was the least of One Nation's problems this week. — Pauline Hanson told abused women to just leave, Malcolm Roberts called COVID deaths staged, and Barnaby Joyce yelled at his dog on live TV — and One Nation's vote climbed anyway.
• Irankunda's next move could make him Australia's most expensive footballer ever — and it's to Ronaldo's old club — Sporting Lisbon are chasing Nestory Irankunda in a deal that would break Australia's transfer record, capping a fortnight of World Cup breakouts cashing in.
• Anthropic just paid authors $1.5 billion for pirated books — days after Albo called it theft — A US judge has approved Anthropic's $1.5 billion payout to authors whose books it pirated to train Claude, giving Albanese's "anything less is theft" line a price tag as the company courts Australia.
• Hanson didn't back down — she said it louder, then refused to apologise for the trip — Hanson used a London conference and a primetime interview to repeat her migration and transgender comments, and insists no taxpayer money funded her European trip.
• A son, a staged crash, and a mother moved into the driver's seat — an inquest asks what the system missed — An Adelaide inquest is examining whether Ethan Grosvenor deliberately crashed and moved his dead mother into the driver's seat, and whether the system failed both.
• Torres sinks 10-man Argentina and sends Messi out in tears — Ferran Torres struck in the 106th minute to beat 10-man Argentina 1-0 and deny Messi a farewell title in his last World Cup match.
• Allan wants to unmask the trolls — South Park already showed how that ends — Victoria's government will draft Australia-first laws forcing tech giants to reveal anonymous trolls' identities and let parents sue over psychiatric harm to their kids.
• The Tate brothers spent years untouchable — now the manosphere's kings are in a Miami cell — US federal agents have arrested Andrew and Tristan Tate in Miami on a UK extradition request, with prosecutors adding rape and child-abuse image charges.
• The government agrees Islamophobia is close to being normalised but won't check whether its own laws are part of the reason — The government accepted 35 of 54 recommendations from its own Islamophobia envoy, but not the independent review of counterterrorism laws he has pushed from the start.
• The cost of six lives in Laos: a food charge and a maximum of four years — The distillery owner faces a minimum of three months, nearly two years after six tourists died in Vang Vieng, including two teenagers from Melbourne.
• Trump demands Canada pay for smoke as its forests burn — More than 900 fires are burning across Canada, and the president says the cost of the smoke will be added to Canadian tariffs.
• Alex Jones, chemtrails, and the man Hanson won't sack — The One Nation senator's Alex Jones appearance and antisemitic mural post have resurfaced, but the record goes back to a sovereign citizen letter in 2011.
• Pauline Hanson wants to run the country. She spent her holiday with a convicted criminal and a billionaire. — The One Nation leader spent her European summer with a billionaire donor and a man Australia has refused a visa, while claiming to speak for battlers.
• Smoking is down, vaping is down, and Australia is consuming more nicotine than ever — Nicotine pouches enter the national drug survey for the first time, used by 8.4 per cent of 18 to 24-year-olds, while overall nicotine consumption climbs.
• Nobody wrote the post you just liked — More than 40 per cent of LinkedIn's long-form posts are written by AI, and the platform's own pledge to crack down on it flagged as AI-generated.
• The eviction notice says the protests are the reason. That's the whole trick. — The breach notice that closed Divine Playhouse cites the protests against it as grounds, and warns more protests are almost certain to come.
• The state that leads on opioids has no rule against turning up high — Amphetamine-type stimulants now make up 60 per cent of positive workplace drug tests, and Victoria has told WorkSafe it won't write an enforceable rule about it.
• How an irate ratepayer single-handedly shut down his local council. — David Penman used a loophole to stand down five of Hepburn Shire's seven councillors, and every council in Victoria is now watching.
• Two boys stabbed in two days. The minister's answer is a law that stops at the school gate. — Queensland's wanding powers have never been shown to reduce violence, and the review that would have tested them was scrapped when the law went permanent.
• Trump spent a day charging the world to use the sea. He changed his mind within 24 hours. — His own secretary of state had warned a fee like this would spread through the world like a contagion.
• Albanese says training AI on Australian art without permission is theft. He didn't announce a law against it. — The Prime Minister promised to legislate data centre rules his government already published in March, while copyright reform got one line and no timeline.
• The US just used a drone boat for the first time. Everyone else got there years ago. — Unmanned speedboats packed with explosives hit an Iranian naval base this week, and America is the last major power to the party.
• What to expect from Albo’s national AI speech today — The Prime Minister is expected to announce a new Office of AI inside his own department today, as Labor stays deadlocked over whether to trade copyright for data centres.
• Victoria's teachers walk out next Thursday as a 28 per cent offer fails to end the fight — Public school staff will strike statewide after knocking back a pay deal the government calls the best in the country, over workloads it says amount to 12 unpaid hours a week.
• Trump sent federal agents to reporters’ doors. Australia should be paying attention. — The subpoenas against New York Times journalists are a warning about what leaders do to the press when embarrassed — and Australia has fewer protections than the United States.
• An “ISIS bride” allegedly taught her toddler to mimic a killer. Australia still has no plan for people like her. — Rayann El Houli is fighting for bail over videos that allegedly show her coaching her children to act like IS fighters. Her case is what a decade without a policy looks like.
• Police say they’ve caught the 20-year-old running a tobacco empire from his bedroom. The empire remains. — The arrest of an alleged syndicate figure is Melbourne’s most consequential yet. The federal settings that built the black market he allegedly served are untouched.
• Four women dead in seven days, and the news cycle had room for everything but them — Two women and two girls were allegedly killed by men they knew this week. The country found time for the Reserve Bank, Modi and the oil price, and barely a moment for them.
• The seven-day rule that could pull the plug on live music — Payday super’s seven-day clock lands hardest on the volunteers who run festivals and gigs, chasing fund details from casual workers who don’t have them.
• Kmart’s K Home is now open, and it’s more fast furniture than IKEA killer — Kmart has opened its first standalone homewares store in Box Hill South, and the hype is louder than the 3,800-square-metre reality.
• Oil roars to a five-year high as Trump taxes the Strait of Hormuz — A 9.5 per cent oil spike is set to squeeze fuel prices and rattle markets after Donald Trump declared a toll on the strait the US had called Iran illegal for threatening.
• The businesses “fleeing” Victoria over work from home already let their staff do it — Peak business groups say a two-day work-from-home right will drive investment interstate. Their own numbers say three-quarters of Victorian businesses already offer it.
• Queensland fined 420 e-scooter riders in a fortnight. One lasted seven minutes. — Queensland's new e-mobility laws have seized more than 100 devices and issued 420 fines in twelve days while Melbourne, which embraced share scooters then binned them, threw most of them in the river.
• Australia is the world’s biggest Claude user, and even the ABC is now writing with it — We use the AI more per person than any country on earth, mostly to do our homework, and now the national broadcaster is turning radio bulletins into articles with it.
• The Iran ceasefire has collapsed, and the world’s oil is caught in the middle — A third round of American strikes and a contested closure of the Strait of Hormuz have reignited a conflict that runs all the way to the petrol bowser in Australia.
• Five arrested over carjacking spree across Melbourne’s north — Teenagers as young as 15 are in custody after a run of alleged carjackings hit six suburbs in ten days.
• YouTuber charged after filming inside Dezi Freeman’s hideout — A Yea man walked into a police station and turned himself in — then told his followers he’d probably just cop a fine.
• Victoria’s public transport payments finally make sense — Tap and go reaches every regional train station this year — 16 years after a myki rollout so botched it became shorthand for public transport failure.
• Cable that broke Norway's heart: England ride spider cam controversy into World Cup semis — Jude Bellingham's stoppage-time equaliser should never have stood — the ball struck an overhead camera cable seconds earlier — and his extra-time winner sent a furious Norway home.
• Telstra to face Senate inquiry over nationwide outage as $30 million fine looms — Hundreds of Triple Zero calls failed and regional trains stopped dead during the nationwide blackout that also stalled bank payments across the country.
• Albanese to give major AI speech as his own base pushes for tougher rules — Labor’s own membership is driving the loudest push to regulate AI as the prime minister prepares a major speech on the technology.
• Meta kills its Instagram AI tool after three days, admitting it “missed the mark” — The opt-out tool let anyone turn a stranger’s public Instagram photos into AI images and SAG-AFTRA told members to protect their likeness
• Boy, 16, charged with murder of Donald teenager Layla Jeffery: What we know — Detectives found the missing teenager’s remains in bushland a kilometre from her home before charging a boy known to her
• Australia jails its first child trafficker after Sydney sex-work syndicate exposed — A 45-year-old Arncliffe man is the first person convicted of child trafficking in Australia after moving an Indonesian teenager to Sydney for sex work
• Police allege a teenager had AI plan a mass shooting for him. It wouldn't be the first time. — Court documents describe a 13-year-old prompting a chatbot for first-person massacre content as lawsuits mount against AI firms overseas
• Federal Labor members push for AI-labelling law on music and art — Federal Labor's membership wants the party to commit to labelling AI-generated music and art as artists warn over a flood of machine-made work.
• Telstra took two and a half hours to tell the minister, as outage sparks Triple Zero test-call row — Telstra detected the fault at 4.30am but did not alert the minister's office until 7am as a Liberal senator's test calls to 000 drew fire.
• How many pharmacies actually stocked nicotine vapes? Almost none — The federal government still defends the pharmacy vape scheme it built while the states clean up the black market it fed.