Watching this from Australia, it’s hard to overstate how strange it is: schools in Florida, Georgia and Colorado are installing pepper-spray drones built to ram an active shooter at up to 97 km/h. Nobody in the story proposes making the guns harder to get.

Nine schools so far. Each gets a storage box housing a plastic drone from Austin firm Mithril Defense, branded Campus Guardian Angel. A teacher hits a panic button. A remote pilot flies the drone down the hallway toward the gunfire.

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Dave Hughes went on a podcast, spent 90 seconds confidently rewriting Australia’s recent economic history, then dared someone to fact-check him. Someone did. It took about 600 words to correct 90 seconds of what the fact-checker called “economic fan fiction.”

Hughes is a television and radio personality and stand-up comedian. Lately he’s drifted into political and economic commentary, most of it aimed at the Federal Labor government’s tax policy changes. He’s understood to run a substantial investment portfolio of his own, like plenty of the policy’s other critics, largely exempt from the change thanks to grandfathering.

In the clip in question, Hughes slates previous governments, (always Labor), while dropping in “I might be wrong” and “I haven’t researched it” as he goes. Caveats are not the same as caution. If you haven’t researched something, the option not to broadcast an opinion on it remains open.

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A UK driving instructor’s leased Nissan sat off the road for three months this year, waiting on a single spare part. By the time it was finally repaired, she had spent more than £2,500 hiring a replacement dual control car, borrowed money from relatives to keep teaching and nearly lost her livelihood over a repair that should have taken days. The Guardian reported the case last week as a straightforward consumer complaint. It reads more like a warning.

The UK setting doesn’t matter. The same parts delays and the same insurance gaps are turning up in Australian driveways too, and mechanics here are already stretched thin before a missing part even enters the picture. If you own a modern car, two things in your policy now matter more than they did five years ago.

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Siri AI just got tested against Gemini in the open, not on an Apple keynote stage. That is a very different test, and this time it held up.

Tech reviewer Stephen Robles ran the two assistants head to head this week, on real devices, doing real tasks: pulling calendar dates from a screenshot, digging through email for a specific detail, identifying a movie from a screen recording, ordering a coffee without touching the app. I wrote about the architecture behind the new Siri back in June, when it was still a demo. This is the first proper look at what it does with your actual phone.

▶ Watch on YouTube

The result is closer than most of us expected. Not a wipeout in either direction. A genuine contest, with each assistant winning on different ground.

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The short answer is Melbourne.

If you want to see the biggest version of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey in Australia, book the IMAX 70mm film presentation at IMAX Melbourne, inside Melbourne Museum in Carlton.

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Source: Artificial Analysis, Comparison of Models, viewed 25 July 2026.

The latest Artificial Analysis model comparison puts Claude Opus 5 (max) at the top of its Intelligence Index with a score of 61. GPT-5.6 Sol (max) is close behind at 59.

That is a marginal lead for Anthropic, but it is an expensive one.

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