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MAHATMA GANDHI ~ Truth never damages a cause that is just.
A plume of black smoke is seen over the port of St. Petersburg, Russia, Wednesday, June 3, 2026, after a Ukrainian drone attack. (AP Photo)
In short:
One
person is dead and an oil depot has been set ablaze after a second
drone attack waged by Ukraine on the Russian city of St Petersburg.
The attack on Saturday came one day after Mr Putin refused an offer to meet his Ukrainian counterpart, Vladimir Zelenskyy.
What's next?
Ukrainian
Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said things would “only get worse for
Russia," and the intensity of attacks would continue to grow.
One
person is dead and an oil depot has been set ablaze after a series of
drone attacks waged by Ukraine on the Russian city of St Petersburg.
Russian air defences intercepted a total of 376 drones according to the country's defence ministry.
Regional
governor Aleksandr Drozdenko said more than 140 drones were shot down
in the Leningrad region, which surrounds St Petersburg.
A
drone attack in the town of Ust-Labinsk caused a fire at an oil depot,
confirmed by local authorities via their Telegram channel.
It comes after a separate Ukrainian drone attack hit an oil terminal in St Petersburg, as well as a nearby naval base on Wednesday.
The
attacks on Wednesday came hours before the opening of the St Petersburg
International Economic Forum, regarded as Russian President Vladimir
Putin’s annual showcase for investment.
Local response
City
Governor Alexander Beglov issued a rare call for residents to stay
indoors, after drone debris killed one person in the Tver region.
The attacks have injured three people according to Mr Beglov.
"I ask the people of St Petersburg to stay at home and not go out onto the streets. Mobile internet services may be disrupted."
"Russian
air defences prevented any damage. The condition of the three injured
is assessed as minor and they have been discharged," he said.
Meeting rejected by Putin
Attacks on Saturday came one day after Mr Putin refused an offer to meet his Ukrainian counterpart, Vladimir Zelenskyy.
Mr Putin described Mr Zelenskyy's open letter proposing the meeting as "boorish".
Russian
President Vladimir Putin speaks to representatives of international
news agencies on the sidelines of the St. Petersburg International
Economic Forum. (Reuters: Dmitri Lovetsky/Pool)
"I see no point in meeting. It only makes sense for the Ukrainian side to stop the advance of our armed forces," he said.
"And we need agreements.
"Let the experts work, develop some solutions, and then we can meet."
He went on to say the war in Ukraine would end only once Russia had achieved its "goals".
Russia
has demanded control of Ukraine's eastern Donbas region as well as
sweeping political and military restrictions on Ukraine.
Ukrainian push back
Ukranian Prime Minister Vladimir Zelenskyy described the strikes as "just a response" to Russia's aggression against Ukraine.
“Last
night, our drones covered a distance of about 1,000 kilometers to the
St Petersburg region — to the enemy navy’s arsenals and a base in
Kronstadt,” Mr Zelenskyy wrote on social media.
Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. (Reuters: Piroschka van de Wouw)
Responding
to Mr Putin's dismissal of the proposed meeting, Ukrainian Foreign
Minister Andrii Sybiha said things would “only get worse for Russia.”
Saturday's attacks coincide with the final day of Russia's flagship economic forum in Saint Petersburg, according to officials.
Mr
Sybiha said "failures will get more humiliating," in a post to social
media, warning there are “no safe places in Russia that can be exempt,"
from Ukrainian long range attacks.
The post also detailed the intensity of attacks “will continue to grow.”
In Ukraine, one person was killed and three people left wounded overnight into Saturday in the Dnipropetrovsk region.
Russian forces struck three districts nearly 30 times with drones and artillery, according to regional head Oleksandr Hanzha.
In
Zaporizhzhia, seven people sought medical care after a Russian drone
strike started a fire in a parking lot, according to regional head Ivan
Fedorov.
On Saturday, the Ukrainian air force said 249 of the 272 strike drones launched by Russia had been shot down overnight.
Outside of the US, Australia has emerged as the premier destination for data centre development. (Supplied: Google)
On
the corner of Mamre Road and the yet-to-be-built South Link Road, in
the western Sydney suburb of Kemps Creek, plans are afoot that could
change the way the world works.
It's
here, in this picturesque semi-rural expanse, wedged between Sydney's
rapidly growing outer suburbs and the new international airport at
Badgerys Creek, that the AI boom has landed in Australia, with a thud.
If
the site owners, IFM Investors, can overcome concerns of local
residents, the 52-hectare site will house one of the world's biggest
data centres, to be built and operated by US-owned Airtrunk at a cost of
more than $5 billion.
Incorporating
six four-storey buildings, 936 cooling units, 852 diesel-powered
back-up generators and a huge diesel storage facility, its operator,
Airtrunk, is hoping to cash in on the rush to AI and the potential role
Australia could play as a regional powerhouse.
An aerial shot of the site proposed for a data centre in Kemps Creek. (Supplied)
Outside of the US, Australia has emerged as the premier destination for data centre development and investment.
More
than $150 billion is lined up, waiting to be poured into this frenzied
race to build AI infrastructure, prompting some analysts to invoke
memories of the mining boom.
Almost 20 per cent of all non-residential construction is now being directed towards building these temples of technology.
As
Westpac senior economist Pat Bustamente points out, this frenzied
investment windfall is taking place alongside a huge investment in
energy generation and transmission.
"Alongside
the potential $200 billion energy transition investment pipeline,
Australia is seeing an investment boom, with the total pipeline
approaching 13 per cent of GDP, rivalling the size of the mining
investment boom," he says.
A Microsoft data centre in Washington state. (Supplied: Microsoft)
Data centres save the day. But what about the future?
When the national accounts data dropped on Wednesday, one thing stood out.
Had
it not been for the cash pouring in to build AI infrastructure, the
Australian economy would have dived deep into a contraction.
About
$13 billion was invested into the sector, helping deliver a record 16
per cent rise in machinery and equipment investment, a result that took
many by surprise.
On
paper at least, it helped offset the pain rippling through households,
hit in the March quarter by the impact of two rate hikes and the early
impact of the Iran war, which sent fuel prices soaring.
The
debilitating combination of an inflation spike and continued rate hikes
is expected to become far more acute for Australian households in
coming months, coupled with rising unemployment as the economy further
slows.
And while this sudden
inflow of foreign capital has been welcomed, there are questions as to
whether the boom will provide benefits much beyond a short-term
construction boost.
For a start, much of the gear inside the new buildings will have to be imported.
As
JP Morgan analyst Tom Ryan penned in a note this week, the benefits
from fitting out these new centres will mostly flow offshore, given
Australia doesn't produce the required technology.
Australia does not produce the technology required to fit out data centres. (ABC News: Rhiannon Stevens)
Those offshore purchases will detract from our economic growth and partly offset the construction boom.
"Compared
to Australia's early 2010s mining capex boom, which peaked at nearly 7
per cent of GDP, the tech dynamic appears much smaller so far," he
wrote.
"While there is likely
still upside for technology capital expenditure, a meaningful share of
data centre fit-out relies on imported capital equipment."
And,
once up and running, the centres are likely to be highly automated to
an extent that there are limited direct job opportunities.
Then
there are serious concerns about the power-hungry nature of all this AI
infrastructure and the strains it could place on an electricity system
already struggling to transition away from fossil fuels.
This
latest boom is likely to lay the foundations for a global workplace
revolution that could prove to be as painful as it is beneficial.
Big tech doesn't like tax
Since the start of the year, there's been a revolving door of US technology heavyweights visiting Down Under.
All are scoping out the landscape for data centre sites.
Microsoft's
Satya Nadella hit town in April, pledging $25 billion in data centre
investment while, just last week, OpenAI boss Sam Altman appeared via
video link at a conference organised by the Australian Financial Review.
"Australia
has among the best natural resources and abundant clean energy [stores]
in the world, and if Australia wanted to become a data centre capital
of the world, it would certainly be able to," Altman said.
Why Australia?
An
abundance of land, the potential for cheap renewable energy, already
established data centre construction skills and the location,
particularly for South East Asian clients.
But the longer-term trade-offs could be expensive.
Microsoft's
Nadella was keen to spruik his company's commitment to upgrading
cybersecurity for the nation and its investment on the ground.
Like
many of his contemporaries, however, he was unwilling to expand much on
whether AI was more likely to replace workers or to help workers
perform better, offering soothing words that it should make life easier.
"The
state of AI, and quite frankly even for the foreseeable future, is more
about what I'll call task level automation inside of jobs," he said.
Global
tech companies have long been in the firing line from the Australian
Tax Office for their innovative approach to reporting earnings and their
ability to shift profits to low tax jurisdictions.
And it would appear, when it comes to data centres, little has changed.
Last
year, it noted the tech giants were booking "limited profits" in
Australia, "purportedly on the basis that the Australian data centre
business is merely providing a service to its foreign associates".
Keeping the lights on
AI
is an incredibly powerful tool, to the extent that even those behind
its development, such as Anthropic's Dario Amodei, are urging caution
about its usage, arguing it has the power to tear society apart.
As powerful as it is, AI also requires huge amounts of power.
Australia
already has about 162 data centres, most of them scattered through NSW
and Victoria close to urban areas. At least another 90, and perhaps
double that, are in the wings, many of which are destined to be
substantially bigger than those currently in use.
As
an illustration, the proposed Mamre Road development in western Sydney
will use about 25 per cent more power than the Tomago aluminium smelter
north of Newcastle.
The
Australian Energy Market Operator expects electricity demand from data
centres will treble within the next four years as Australia becomes a
regional hub for Asian users.
Most of the pressure, however, will be placed on the grid in Sydney and to a lesser extent Melbourne.
In Sydney, data centres will use about 11 per cent of available power by 2030, up from 4 per cent now.
In
Melbourne, while on a much smaller scale than Sydney, the demand will
more than quadruple to about 8 per cent of the state's power.
Some are calling for Australia's new data centres to be powered by renewable energy. (ABC Rural: Sally Bryant)
"If
data centre growth is not matched with new renewable generation and
storage, this could increase wholesale prices by more than 20 per cent
across our main grid by 2035, on average — and up to 26 per cent in NSW
and 23 per cent in Victoria," the study found.
Similar
demand growth will be placed on water supply, although by 2030 data
centres in Sydney will require about 2 per cent of the city's water and
just under 1 per cent of Melbourne's needs.
During extended droughts, that increased usage could become critical.
Without
extensive oversight and planning, the data centre boom, which promises a
mostly short-term growth hit, could become a burden.
I
have spent the past five years collecting evidence of grave violations
of international law in Gaza and the West Bank. All states, including
Australia, must respond to these atrocities
Last month the foreign minister, Penny Wong, called Israeli soldiers’ actionsin
relation to the Gaza humanitarian flotilla “shocking and unacceptable”
and on Thursday she said that the treatment of Australian women on the
flotilla was “unacceptable”. Former minister Ed Husic said that there
are many actions the Australian government should take to address
Israel’s continuing crimes in the occupied Palestinian territories. I
agree with them both.
I have spent the past five years collecting and analysing evidence of grave violations of international law in Gaza
and the West Bank. Since October 2023, much of my work has focused on
Gaza, where the scale of civilian suffering, destruction, displacement
and deprivation has raised profound legal and moral concerns. Our UN
commission of inquiry has concluded that Israel’s conduct in Gaza
constitutes war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide under
international law.
While
attention has been drawn away by the Israeli-American war against Iran,
this conduct is continuing. The death toll in Gaza continues to rise.
Identified direct victims of the violence now number almost 73,000.
Estimates of indirect deaths go into the hundreds of thousands. The
strip is in ruins. Humanitarian access is still gravely restricted,
while displacement, deprivation and insecurity continue on a massive
scale, including severe malnutrition among infants and young children.
Last October Israel controlled 53% of the Gaza Strip; now it controls
60% and the Israeli prime minister said last week that it intends to
control 70%.
Nor
is the crisis confined to Gaza. Violence and dispossession in the West
Bank have intensified, accompanied by increasing settler attacks and
deepening restrictions on Palestinian life. There is more and more
evidence of torture, mistreatment and sexual violence in Israeli
detention.
International
law, as interpreted and applied by the international court of justice,
imposes obligations on all states, including Australia, to act
individually and collectively in response to these atrocities. Australia
may be far away and its influence limited but its international law
obligations are not reduced by distance or political limitations. There
are steps the Australian government can and should take. I have proposed
20 of them in a series of lectures I have been presenting with
Professors Emily Crawford and Ben Saul around Australia, organised by
the Association for the Promotion of International Law and Amnesty
International Australia:
The first action should be a wide ranging
review to identify the many ways in which Australia’s relations with
Israel support Israel committing international crimes.
Trade and diplomatic measures include ceasing
all defence-related trade with Israel, including dual-use products,
components, materials and technology, and ending trade and cooperative
ventures with companies developing military items for use by Israel.
Australia should also withdraw Australian defence and trade officials
from our Tel Aviv embassy and impose secondary sanctions on states
conducting defence-related trade with Israel.
Accountability measures comprise Australia
affirming its commitment to enforce international criminal court arrest
warrants for Israeli political and military leaders, along with imposing
personal sanctions against these leaders and Israeli settlers
responsible for violence in the West Bank.
Legal enforcement actions include investigating
and prosecuting Australian citizens who have served in the Israel
Defense Forces since October 2023 for potential war crimes, crimes
against humanity or genocide, while prohibiting Australian citizens from
fighting in foreign armed forces. The full force of Australian law
should be applied to Australians who commit international crimes, as
prime minister Anthony Albanese has said.
Settlement-focused measures would prohibit
financial transactions with illegal Israeli settlements and end tax
deductibility for Australian charities providing funding to
organisations supporting illegal settlements.
Additionally, Australia should provide at
least 15,000 humanitarian places for Palestinian refugees from Gaza and
restore scholarship eligibility for Palestinians to undertake tertiary
studies in Australia.
This is not a wishlist.
It is the simple implementation of legal obligations. Australia wants to
be a good international citizen. This is how it can be that.
Pete
Hegseth will update a directive on the autonomy of weapons systems "to
ensure the deliberate adoption of AI systems that respect the chain of
command". (Reuters: Evan Vucci)
In short:
The
White House said it would accelerate the development and use of AI for
national security applications, including "intelligence and war fighting
domains".
Major AI lab Anthropic is warning of an increased risk of "humans losing control over AI systems".
The Trump administration has stressed the technology should not be used to carry out unlawful surveillance.
The White House says it will accelerate the development and use of artificial intelligence for national security applications.
The news came as a major AI company warned of an increased risk of "humans losing control over AI systems".
The
Trump administration announced the plans while stressing the technology
should not be used to carry out unlawful surveillance.
Earlier,
it asked leading AI developers to voluntarily submit their most capable
models for government cybersecurity tests before releasing them to the
public.
"Under my
Administration, the United States can and will responsibly accelerate
the use of AI across intelligence and war fighting domains in line with
American values," US President Donald Trump said in a national security
memorandum.
Mr
Trump said US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had 90 days to update an
existing directive on the autonomy of weapons systems "to ensure the
deliberate adoption of AI systems that respect the chain of command".
The
US president added AI technologies should not be developed or used by
the national security enterprise "to censor free speech … or conduct
unauthorised or unlawful surveillance activities".
AI increasingly developing other AI systems, Anthropic warns
The
Trump administration's plans for AI comes as Anthropic warns companies
are increasingly delegating AI development to other AI systems.
In
a blog post, the US company said if it was taken far enough, the trend
could lead to "an AI system capable of fully autonomously designing and
developing its own successor".
This
post poses the latest warning from Anthropic, whose co-founder
Christopher Olah recently praised Pope Leo for his encyclical on the
rise of AI.
As
of May 2026, more than 80 per cent of the code merged into Anthropic's
coding system was authored by its own chatbot, Claude, it said.
It also said that by 2027 Claude would be capable of tasks that took a person weeks, according to research.
"These
trends have huge implications. AI that can build itself would be a
major development in the history of technology — one that could bring
enormous good for the world in science, healthcare, and beyond," it
wrote.
"But full recursive self-improvement also might increase the risks of humans losing control over AI systems.
"If
systems are capable of fully building their own successors, the ways we
secure them, monitor them, and shape their behavior all grow much more
important."
The blog post came in the wake of a clash between Anthropic and the Pentagon.
The
Pentagon slapped a formal supply-chain risk designation on Anthropic in
March after it refused to back down on bans against Claude being used
to power autonomous weapons and mass US surveillance.
The Pentagon said it should be able to use the technology as needed, as long as it complied with US law.
Further
in its post, Anthropic said while Claude's code was improving, many of
the staff believed "the Claude-written code was still worse in quality
than human-written code at Anthropic in late 2025".
With
the potential for this to change shortly, it proposed a global "option
to slow or temporarily pause frontier AI development to enable societal
structures and alignment research to keep up with the advance of the
technology".
It said it would work to build systems with other labs to allow this slowdown to occur.
"A
meaningful slowdown or pause would require multiple well-resourced labs
at or near the frontier, in multiple countries, agreeing to stop under
the same conditions, the authors wrote.
"It would also require that each can verify that the others have actually stopped."
A "meaningful slowdown" would require multiple labs to agree to the idea. (Reuters: Dado Ruvic)
It noted the difficulty of this approach, given AI can be "far easier to conceal than missile silos".
"None
of this is necessarily impossible in principle — the world has built
verification regimes for other complex technologies (e.g., the
Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty)— but those regimes took
decades to build both the infrastructure and the trust" the blog post
concluded.
"We don't have that long.
"A
unilateral pause by one lab, by contrast, is achievable immediately,
but accomplishes much less: it would change who the front-runner is, but
it would not create the wider deliberative process that is currently
missing."
