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Australia Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade TranscriptFriday 22 May 2026 Wollongong The Hon Anthony Albanese MPPrime Minister of Australia The Hon Anika Wells MPMinister for Sport Minister for Communications ANDREW LANCASTER, ST GEORGE ILLAWARRA CEO:Good morning, and welcome to the Bruce Gordon Centre, the newly launched Bruce Gordon Centre. It’s great to be here today, and it’s great to have the Dragons, the St. George Illawarra Dragons finally pulled together under one roof. One club, one very strong club under one roof, for the first time in our club’s history. Nice to have the ability here today to celebrate…

IZMIR — In a pair of milestones that underscore Ankara’s growing ambitions as a regional military player, Libya and Syria have deployed forces to Turkey’s EFES-2026 Combined Joint Live-Fire Field Exercise — the first time either country has participated in a military exercise on foreign soil.The live-fire phase of EFES-2026 ran through May 21 along the Aegean coast near İzmir, making it one of Turkey’s largest combined and joint exercises to date. Conducted under the Aegean Army Command, the drill spanned two phases — a computer-assisted command post phase in April and the live-fire field phase — drawing over 10,000…

Editor’s Note: This essay is from the Security & Defence PLuS Emerging Voices Series, which highlights the next generation of scholars and practitioners shaping thinking on strategy, security, and defense. The series brings together perspectives from PhD candidates and early career researchers, grounded in the complex geopolitical realities of the 21st century. The collection explores a “Latticework of Resilience” that connects often-overlooked sectors, such as subnational diplomacy and critical infrastructure inherent in agriculture security, to the core of national security. Taken together, the essays emphasize the importance of adaptive, multidisciplinary approaches to building resilience in an increasingly complex global environment. The…

Each generation of lieutenants enters the Army convinced that warfare is changing. Usually they are right, but only partially. While the character of war evolves, its nature remains constant. New technologies emerge, doctrines evolve, and enemies adapt. Yet the fundamental burden of junior leadership remains stubbornly constant: leading human beings, often young, often frightened, through uncertainty, violence, and chaos in support of a nation’s interests. That doesn’t change. Today’s newly commissioned lieutenants face a battlefield that is changing faster than at any time since the Industrial Revolution. Artificial intelligence accelerates targeting cycles. Drones place reconnaissance and strike capabilities into the…

Bittium participated in Locked Shields 2026, the world’s largest and most complex live‑fire cyber defence exercise, organised by the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence (CCDCOE). The exercise brought together over 4,000 participants from 41 nations to strengthen the defence of critical infrastructure and military systems against real‑time cyber threats. Locked Shields 2026 challenged multinational teams to defend complex and realistic IT environments supporting essential societal and military functions, including critical infrastructure, air defence systems and electronic voting platforms. The exercise placed strong emphasis on crisis management, legal considerations and strategic decision‑making alongside technical cyber defence. Bittium contributed to…

Mikey Musumeci successfully defended his UFC BJJ bantamweight title for the third time in the main event of UFC BJJ 8 and called for a match with UFC lightweight contender Arman Tsarukyan next.Musumeci made quick work of Kevin Dantzler inside the bowl, attempting multiple heel hooks to Dantzler eventually succumbed to the move at the 2:15 mark Thursday night at the Meta APEX.In his post-fight interview, Musumeci called for a match with Tsarukyan next. The MMA fighter has ben very active in grappling and wrestling bouts while reportedly serving as the plan B for the Ilia Topuria vs. Justin Gaethje…

In March 2026, a group of Australian authors published Secession by Western Australia, a provocative work that does not merely speculate on independence, but lays out a detailed constitutional, legal, and economic blueprint for a new sovereign state. Grounded in historical grievances and contemporary political tensions within the Australian federation, the book reflects a broader reality: in liberal democratic contexts, the idea of secession remains a legitimate subject of public debate and academic inquiry. This raises a more difficult question when considered beyond such contexts. If secession can be openly theorised and even advocated in places like Western Australia, what…

Fifty-three years after the “The World at War” debuted its comprehensive 26-episode arch chronicling the events of the Second World War, the History Channel and the National World War II Museum have teamed up with Tom Hanks to deliver what they hope to be updated docuseries uncovering “new dimensions of the conflict,” according to the History Channel.“I think the sweep and scope of the documentary is itself illuminating,” Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jon Meacham told Military Times via email. “We are saying, ‘In a fragmented culture dominated by the device in your hand, you need to look up and engage in…

Former UFC champion Miesha Tate has given her thoughts on her iconic feud with Ronda Rousey. As we know, Ronda Rousey and Miesha Tate are two of the biggest female mixed martial arts stars in the history of the sport. It makes sense, then, that they collided twice in the cage – and on both occasions, it was Ronda who was able to pick up the win, with the pair also having a really tense feud as part of The Ultimate Fighter. Tate would go on to win a world championship herself in the UFC, ironically by defeating Holly Holm,…

Running a WordPress site should not mean carrying the full weight of security operations yourself. On WordPress.com, security is handled at the platform level through continuous scanning, managed infrastructure, virtual patches, backups, and human-led response. The Essential Plugin supply chain attack is one example of what that looks like in practice. When malicious code was found across a portfolio of plugins, WordPress.com security teams identified affected hosted sites, updated detection systems, deployed a DNS-level block against the attacker-controlled domain, and removed malicious code from impacted environments. This post explains what happened, how WordPress.com responded, and why proactive, managed security matters…