Jozef Imrich, name worthy of Kafka, has his finger on the pulse of any irony of interest and shares his findings to keep you in-the-know with the savviest trend setters and infomaniacs.
''I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.''
-Kurt Vonnegut
A heartfelt and fun science fiction epic. It showcases the power of a bromance, and touches on the place where bravery comes from.
The movie is consistently charming. I was surprised at how many chuckles it got out of me, as well as a few laughs. I do think it falls in love with its own charm a little too much at times. I wish there were like 15% less jokes. It's a bit too much in certain stretches, but they still hit most of the way.
Despite that complaint, I did really enjoy the relationship that carries the movie. It gets you attached quick, and that attachment never stops growing. It is executed on beautifully. Before it is established, I didn't feel like the movie was always quite at the peaks that it would eventually get to. I think it struggles at keeping its science elements interesting in particular. Aa an example, a section about language took a while to develop, and then suddenly went from no progress to pretty much completely done. Also, they occasionally focus too hard on the wrong things in my view, like on how much fun they are having in a store buying the equipment for the "science stuff". On the plus side, the actual space moments almost all hit thanks to excellent visuals and music.
Ryan Gosling carries the movie and he was more than up for the task. His comedic timing is great, and he has emotional weight when needed. I certainly won't be surprised if he ends up with a nomination for this one. He's great both on the ship and in the many excellent flashbacks the film has.
In the end, I'm not sure if I'd say "amaze amaze amaze" to Project Hail Mary. But I'd certainly say "enjoy enjoy enjoy" (haha that was a JOKE. Get it? IM SO QUIRKY)
A true friend is someone who thinks that you are a good egg, even though he knows that you are slightly cracked.
Media Dragon Never knowingly wrong since 1980 … as confirmed by Miss *ade …
“I don’t know why one person gets sick, and another does not, but I can only assume that some natural laws which we don’t understand are at work. I cannot believe that God ‘sends’ illness to a specific person for a specific reason. I don’t believe in a God who has a weekly quota of malignant tumors to distribute, and consults His computer to find out who deserves one most or who could handle it best.
Law Prep Tutorial in its Best Books for Law Students & Lawyers lists law books in fiction, nonfiction, and other genres. Here are the top 7 in fiction novels:
The mix is an interesting one indeed, with John Grisham writing three of the top seven. He is in fancy company, alongside Harper Lee, Franz Kafka, Charles Dickens, and Scott Turow.
What would your list
What can poetry give us in times of crisis?
At their best, poets both offer us an immersive break from clamorous news feeds and fortify us for the future
In her three years as Poet Laureate of the United States, from 2022 to 2025, Ada Limón travelled the length and breadth of her country. She found that communities everywhere made room for poetry in multiple ways, and her experiences inspired Against Breaking: On The Power of Poetry, out on April 7. Limón asks: “When so much is needed, desperately and urgently, in the world, how can one make an argument for poetry?” But people are hungry for poetry, language and connection, she suggests. It allows them to “recognize our own suffering and our own joy”.
Most forms of art can offer consolation and refuge but poets, at their best, give our attention a welcome and immersive break from clamorous news feeds.
The American poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil, who lives in Oxford, Mississippi, has just released a fresh collection titled Night Owl. These poems are an invitation to befriend and explore nocturnal life, to treat night as more than either a fearful place of shadows, or downtime:
My best friend has always been ink and she lets me talk so much at night. One of the marvels of my life — an alphabet. A whole green and mossy world can be made and remade from just twenty-six dark curlicues.
In one of her poems, “How To Build a Moon Garden when the News Is All Horror”, Nezhukumatathil reminds us that gardens — like poetry — more than providing refuge or escape, can be spaces that bring us closer to life and remind us to be more present in the world as it is:
Turn off the hiss and whirr from man-made lights and walk the night, walk the grass, the fence line, let your boot crackle over pebble and stick bits.
We may not have to have hope, but we have to have some curiosity. We have to have some resilience
Too often, escape is not possible. The Iranian poet Ali Asadollahi has advocated for the freedom of writers and editors who faced trials or imprisonment. Asadollahi is well-known in Iran for his six collections of poetry in Persian and for his work as an editor. His poetry has ranged from serious explorations of Iran’s history to more playful excursions into language, script and shape-poems. In early 2026, his translation from Farsi of his poem “I Used to Dream, I Used to be Safe” was published on the Modern Poetry in Translation website:
When the world is immersed in smoke, give me a sign. Remember me somewhere beyond the mountains, beyond the seas and burnt bodies.
In January, Asadollahi was detained in the mass protests and he remains incarcerated in Tehran’s Evin prison. PEN International recently reported that Asadollahi has been subjected to interrogation and could face further torture. As the lights go dark in many countries plunged into wars, and authoritarian winds cut like knives through once-thriving democracies like my own, it is up to readers to remember the ones who give words to our protests, prayers and anthems.
Other poets, like the Canadian Karen Solie, have found fresh ways to address the rapid shifts in the weather, the landscape and the discomfort we feel these days in an unpredictable environment. Solie teaches in Scotland, and rather than lament humanity’s destructiveness, she writes of climate change as an act of resistance on the part of the earth. One of my favourites from Wellwater, her 2025 TS Eliot Prize-winning collection, is “Smoke”, about summer fires in Fox Creek, Alberta:
Disabused of an illusion we say the fog has lifted, the smoke has cleared, the dust has settled, and now we see, though what arises is not clarity but a set of new misgivings. Is this how the world will be and not just how it is?
We’re often given slightly sugary reasons why we keep returning to poetry, but Limón brings more clarity to our tendency to keep a favourite poet in our back pockets. “We may not have to have hope, but we have to have some curiosity. We have to have some resilience,” she said in a 2024 interview.
In “Startlement”, one of Limón’s recent poems, the narrator places us at a riverside, in companionship with other creatures, from a blue-bellied lizard to an unknown bird. “We were never at the circle’s center, instead/ all around us something is living or trying to live. / The world says, What we are becoming, we are / becoming together . . . ”
We live in uncertain times, but we can carry some lightness, some hard-won wisdom into the future.
For weeks, authorities suspected the Raider was carrying a hidden drug shipment. When it headed for Australia’s coast, they looked the other way.
Riley Walter
APRIL 4, 2026
Law enforcement agencies allowed a cargo ship suspected of carrying a tonne of cocaine to sail unimpeded along Australia’s east coast rather than intercept it and risk a political storm if its crew claimed asylum.
The ship ignored the Australian Border Force’s direction and remained in Australian waters, where it allegedly offloaded the drugs worth about half a billion dollars, to an organised crime syndicate. The decision has called into question federal agencies’ handling of major drug traffickers’ increasing targeting of Australia.
Authorities are now working to locate the cocaine. They are also trying to contain the fallout from a bungle that has further strained the relationship between state and federal law enforcement agencies after the Australian Federal Police left NSW Police in the dark about the operation. This masthead has spoken with multiple law enforcement sources who sought anonymity to confirm details of the investigation.
French law enforcement agencies seized and destroyed 4.87 tonnes of cocaine found onboard the Raider during a military-led operation on January 16 before releasing its crew without charge. Soon after, as the Raider continued sailing towards Australia, the AFP received intelligence about suspected additional cocaine onboard. By then the AFP, which had been monitoring the Raider for several weeks, believed a local arm of the syndicate importing the cocaine had planned to meet the ship at sea to collect the delivery.
The crew of the Raider, docked at Snails Bay, Birchgrove, allegedly offloaded a tonne of cocaine in Australian waters after being allowed to sail the coast unimpeded.SITTHIXAY DITTHAVONG
But the AFP had not shared the intelligence about the suspected cargo with NSW Police and ABF officers who intercepted the Raider 180 nautical miles off the NSW coast on February 19, according to several sources familiar with the investigation. Aware that 11 crew members may try to claim asylum in Australia, and the logistical challenges of sequestering the Raider the ABF opted to turn the shiparound, rather than seizing it, according to several law enforcement sources familiar with the decision-making process. No AFP officials were onboard the NSW Police boat Nemesis during the interception.
Two ABF officers onboard the Nemesis provided the crew supplies, and redirected the Raider towards New Caledonia. Officers on the Nemesis – used in lieu of ABF vessels that had been deployed in Australia’s north to combat people-smuggling and which were therefore unavailable – were told the Raider’s interception was related to immigration matters only, several sources familiar the operation said.
Four days after it was redirected, though, the Raider changed course and headed back towards Australia’s east coast, according to satellite tracking of the ship’s route. On February 26, a week after it had been turned around, the Raider reached waters off Gladstone, a Queensland port city about 500 kilometres north of Brisbane that law enforcement sources familiar with organised crime syndicates’ methods say is used as a collection point for drugs being smuggled into Australia. The ABF, unable to intercept the Raider because of a lack of resources and personnel on the country’s east coast, allowed the ship to continue on its route. It is unclear when the AFP shared the intelligence about the suspected cargo with the ABF.
Over the next week, the Raider sailed a course experienced investigators say is consistent with well-travelled drug trafficking routes, passing several locations on the NSW coast where smugglers have regularly offloaded cargo. Still, authorities did not intervene.
Not until after the Raider was escorted into Sydney Harbour following a distress call to the Australian Maritime Safety Authority on March 12, three weeks after the ship had been redirected, did federal authorities become aware that the cocaine had been offloaded. During searches of the Raider and crew members’ phones, ABF officials allegedly found several key pieces of evidence indicating the cocaine had been successfully imported. Only when the Raider had been escorted into Sydney Harbour did federal authorities share the weeks-old intelligence about the ship’s cargo with NSW investigators. Privately, senior NSW Police officers have lambasted the agencies’ handling of the situation and the decision to withhold crucial information that could have prevented the alleged importation. The AFP and the ABF’s handling of the operation, they said, signalled a weak approach to drug-trafficking on Australia’s east coast.
Messages allegedly discovered on the phones of Raider crew members identified a hidden compartment under a cupboard where the additional tonne of cocaine not detected by French authorities had been stored. The newly uncovered evidence, the AFP and the ABF said in a joint statement lauding the arrests of six Raider crew members on Monday, was “consistent with the allegation” the ship had been carrying cocaine as it headed towards Australia.
Starlink internet hardware was onboard the ship, allowing crew members to communicate with overseas contacts throughout their months-long voyage. The agencies said evidence found on the seized devices suggested at least one drop-off had been made in Australian waters, but they believe the cocaine was offloaded at several locations. None of the cocaine, estimated to have a street value between $300 million and $600 million depending on the supply levels of the drug in NSW, has been found.
Last Saturday, AFP detectives charged six Raider crew members – five Honduran men aged 26 to 61, and a 43-year-old Ecuadorian man – with conspiring to import a commercial quantity of a border-controlled drug. Charging the men with plotting to traffic the shipment, an offence that still carries a maximum penalty of life imprisonment, was considered the best-case scenario for empty-handed investigators, who cannot charge the crew members with importing the cocaine unless it is found. Several crew members have returned to Honduras. At least one crew member remains at Villawood Immigration Detention Centre in Sydney’s west.
Some of the crew told relatives they had responded to a Facebook advertisement and been contracted to deliver the Raider to a Queensland company that had purchased the ship, according to sources familiar with the communications but unwilling to be publicly identified. Crew members said they had not been paid since December 20, shortly after they claim to have been employed by recruiters hiring sailors on behalf of the ship’s owners, and days before satellites recorded the Raider travelling through the Panama Canal. The crew said no modifications had been made to the Raider and no cargo had been loaded onto it after they took possession, according to the sources. Police say the Raider was modified to house the $1.8 billion worth of cocaine onboard when the ship left Central America.
French authorities seize 4.87 tonnes of cocaine found onboard the Raider near Tahiti in January.HIGH COMMISSION OF THE REPUBLIC IN FRENCH POLYNESIA
Little public information exists about the Raider, which was built in Houma, Louisiana, in 1991, and registered to the US and Honduran ports of New Orleans and La Ceiba since. But according to the ship’s limited available tracking data, the Raider made no manoeuvres and was never recorded leaving or entering a port until last November, when it sailed from Coxen Hole, near La Ceiba, to Panama under the flag of Togo, a west African nation regarded as having low oversight of the shipping industry. No class surveys, which are required to insure a ship, have ever been recorded for the Raider, and nor have any safety certificates. The ship’s lack of recorded activity indicates its sailing history might have been altered or that it might have gone intentionally undocumented to disguise criminal activity, according to shipping industry and law enforcement sources familiar with methods used by organised crime syndicates and international drug cartels.
The Raider’s crew, intending to deceive authorities about the vessel’s origin, had purchased an Australian flag during a stopover in Rarotonga in the Cook Islands in late January, said law enforcement sources seeking anonymity to discuss operational details.
Organised crime syndicates are increasingly trafficking drugs through the Pacific, which has become the preferred route of international cartels capitalising on Australia’s appetite for cocaine. This year, French authorities operating in the Pacific have seized more than 11 tonnes of cocaine.
Authorities believe the cocaine onboard the Raider was stored in a compartment hidden under a cupboardAUSTRALIAN FEDERAL POLICE
Authorities are working to trace the murky ownership history of the Raider, which, according to the limited available records of the ship, has been registered since last November to a Panama City-based technology company with a limited online footprint. The company could not be reached for comment. The ship, previously sailing under the Honduran flag, was sold in 2021 to an undisclosed buyer. Some records show the Raider’s registration was updated after French authorities seized the cocaine in January and the ship was recorded as sailing under an unknown flag; other records indicate its owner may have tried to register the ship under the Bolivian flag and rename it.
Detectives are investigating what knowledge of the cargo the Raider’s crew had, and whether the sailors were willing participants in the alleged importation or if they were onboard the ship under duress.
In response to more than 20 questions put to both agencies about the Raider operation, an ABF spokesperson said the force’s approach to the ship was “measured, informed and in the best interests of Australia’s border protection”.
An AFP spokesperson said investigations into the activities of the Raider were ongoing, including inquiries in Australia and offshore to identify syndicate members involved in the supply and collection of the cocaine. The office of Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke, who oversees the ABF and the AFP, declined to comment on the operation.
This has been out in the world for a while, but I just ran across it the other day: Bloody Murder is an unreleased track recorded during the studio sessions for Good Kid, M.A.A.D City. It samples Radiohead’s Everything In Its Right Place and it’s gooood. Available on YouTube and Soundcloud.
ZDNET – “This free privacy tool gave me answers. Data is gold, and some companies go to great lengths to collect it, store it, and sell it. But you can put an end to it. [Note – sort of]
There’s a service called Global Privacy Controlthat offers extensions and/or links to browsers and apps that support the cause. This service began in 2020 and was inspired by the California Consumer Privacy Act, which gives California residents the right to opt out of any business that would sell their data. Currently, GPC is available for:
Inside the Luke Sayers saga and the AFL’s day in court In court documents, Cate Sayers claims the AFL took only two weeks to clear her husband of making the social media post and any wrongdoing
AFL club presidents might still get away with things that footballers never would but even these non-paid so-called scions of society are now subjected to a higher set of standards in a world where Luke Sayers’ predecessor, John Elliott, would not have lasted a season.
When Sayers took over the Carlton presidency in 2021 he was still being forced to deal with the cultural damage and collateral schisms which had festered for two decades since Elliott was forced out after his club’s systematic salary cap cheating was exposed.
Former Carlton president Luke Sayers is being sued for defamation by his estranged wife, Cate.GETTY IMAGES
Elliott, who died in 2021, had his name stripped from a stand and was later banned by the Blues after alleging the club had paid hush money during his time to women who claimed they had been sexually assaulted by Carlton footballers. But even before all of that, Elliott was making highly offensive comments to women at AFL functions and on one occasion touched up the wife of another club’s chief executive, as I reported at the time. Even after that incident was exposed, there were raised eyebrows but little else.
Still, the now departed Jack, who for years also thought he was bigger than the smoking bans across football venues, was an outlier among his brethren – and it was very much a brethren back then.
It would be nice to say the same about Allan McAlister, the former Collingwood president who said shortly after the famous Nicky Winmar stand against racial vilification that the Magpies did not have an issue with Indigenous Australians “as long as they conduct themselves like white people ...”
“Conduct unbecoming” was not a thing back in 1993, but nor was another Collingwood president in Eddie McGuire sanctioned 20 years later when he made his infamous King Kong comment relating to Adam Goodes.
John Elliott when he ruled Carlton.ANGELA WYLIE
Even though the Collingwood board and his various media outlets took no action, McGuire did apologise and underwent a racial education process through the AFL. Which is more than can be said of then-Hawthorn president Jeff Kennett after his albeit significantly less damaging 2019 observation that security staff at Marvel Stadium were “new arrivals” who did not understand the game.
By then head office had a head of social inclusion on its executive team, but nothing much happened and the strongest pushback came from another club president in Brisbane’s Andrew Wellington, who expressed his dismay in writing to AFL chiefs.
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If only someone at Carlton had been prepared to self-regulate sooner after the lewd photograph – which exposed not only Sayers’ anatomy but ultimately his then shattering and now well and truly shattered marriage – appeared on social media 15 months ago for those fateful 13 minutes.
Sayers should have resigned immediately for the sake of his family, and in the knowledge that whatever his role in the scandal, his club needed to be distanced from it.
Instead, Sayers battled on, telling friends – in what can only be regarded as naivety combined with hubris – that he had done nothing wrong and therefore could survive the scandal. Not everyone on his board agreed, and those directors, too, should have pushed Sayers to do the right thing.
Because Sayers did not resign, the AFL felt compelled to investigate the Blues president on the basis he might be guilty of conduct unbecoming. AFL chief executive Andrew Dillon should not be pilloried for this, although you can’t help but feel his predecessor Gillon McLachlan, a champion of the negotiated outcome, would have convinced his mate Sayers that he had to immediately walk away. Certainly, then commission chairman Richard Goyder could have stepped in.
That way an integrity investigation could have been avoided, an investigation from which the findings and the entire process have now become a major embarrassment for the game’s head office, with Cate Sayers’ defamation case against her estranged husbandheaded for the Supreme Court.
Luke Sayers was cleared by an AFL investigation led by the league’s integrity unit.ELKE MEITZEL
Sayers went within weeks anyway. It has been reported that Carlton also investigated Sayers and his role in the photograph scandal through its then compliance boss turned club director Chris Townshend. Carlton bosses say this never happened. It seems there was little communication between Sayers and his board during that tumultuous period.
In fact, Townshend, a barrister, was a middle man between the club and the AFL’s integrity unit and ultimately convinced Sayers the issue had become a major distraction for the Blues and he should step down. But the timing was poor, coming so soon after Sayers was cleared by the AFL, and smacked of a deal.
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It is true that the scandal damaged Carlton and saw some brief board unrest, but it was quickly settled when Rob Priestley prevailed as Sayers’ successor.
Carlton have significantly bigger on-field issues. For the club’s angry and frustrated supporters, coach Michael Voss is the targetand Sayers is a distant memory. Not so for head office, which began the ill-fated investigation with the best intentions but is now feeling the heat.
This is the last thing that Dillon – who is facing a number of challenges among his executive team – needs right now, and it looks disastrous for the game’s new media executive Sharon McCrohan. Never has the competition’s key spin doctor faced so much public scrutiny and been so publicly targeted by the media.
McCrohan, a surprise appointment at the end of last season, raised eyebrows because of her close links with Sayers for whom she initially worked during the PwC tax scandal. At least one club executive warned Dillon that McCrohan could pose a problem.
Not only is her style, sometimes prone to confrontation, at odds with her predecessor Brian Walsh, but McCrohan is powerless to help with this scandal despite her impressive CV and years of experience, because of her previous role. Her leading role in the saga is making some of the game’s governors uncomfortable. McCrohan’s supporters insist that she worked for Sayers as a favour over the photograph scandal and on a pro bono basis.
Luke and Cate Sayers in 2023.GETTY IMAGES
Whether you accept the explanation that its integrity and legal lieutenants had no reason to disbelieve Sayers’ version of events, which came in the form of a statutory declaration, it certainly appears that some of his claims were untested.
That the AFL believes Sayers did not post the photograph – which was linked to a female executive of a Carlton sponsor – is beyond dispute. What Cate Sayers alleges is that the league colluded with Carlton and Luke to exonerate him.
But AFL scandals over the years have been punctuated by a “blame the woman” scenario.
For Dillon, McCrohan, her predecessor Walsh and the AFL’s investigators, the best outcome now is for Sayers v Sayers to move to the Family Court where no subpoenaed AFL conversations would see the light of day. The AFL wishes Luke Sayers would reach a settlement with his former wife, but by all reports he has attempted as much, to no avail.
Compared with the sins of some presidents who have gone before him, Sayers’ deeply personal photograph was a titillating story – humiliating for him and his family and potentially embarrassing for just one other party. That it has moved into the corridors of power at Docklands can only be seen as an own goal for the AFL.
