Trump said Putin would “immediately” release hundreds of thousands of tonnes of diesel onto the global market, and the US Treasury simultaneously issued an OFAC licence easing Russian sanctions through 7 April 2027. Diesel has soared ~70% since the Iran war began in February, and Moscow’s July export ban — later extended — was behind much of the spike. Zelenskyy called the move “an obvious weakness” that “plays into Russia's hands,” while on Monday six Ukrainian energy sites were hit by Russia despite Trump's weekend ceasefire claim; the Kremlin refused to comment and Lavrov said Ukraine “doesn't deserve respite.” Lawmakers from both parties are pushing back weeks out from the US midterms.
Iran-backed Houthis hit Riyadh's King Khalid International Airport and another facility, killing 13 in a significant escalation. Saudi Arabia has suspended more flights, and Australia's Penny Wong condemned the “stolen lives”, with DFAT updating its travel advice. The strikes are forcing a rethink of Trump's Saudi strategy.
BBC Panorama and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism found that, with help from Deloitte, Roman Abramovich's advisors backdated documents so his superyachts and mansions disappeared from accounts, helping the Russian oligarch evade tax.
The economics Nobel went to the pair behind New Keynesian models of how policy can “smooth” short-term crises — timely as diesel and inflation spike globally amid the Iran war and Russia sanctions churn.
Federal agents searched the Minnesota Democrat's home as part of a fraud investigation. Omar, first elected in 2018, is one of Trump's most prominent congressional critics.
In a 3-2 first for Australia's apex court, the High Court upheld community group DAMSHEG, ruling NSW planning authorities must consider the local climate impacts of downstream (Scope 3) emissions from MACH Energy's Mount Pleasant mine near Muswellbrook. The ruling could ripple across ~17 coal and gas proposals in the pipeline, and the Coalition is already demanding the law change. Existing operations run to 2032.
Sydney is facing a scorcher in the low-to-mid 30s with dry lightning raising bushfire risk; total fire bans are in force across the region and locals are being urged to stay safe in the heat.
Former students of western Sydney's Redeemer Baptist School told a NSW parliamentary inquiry they slept in the same building as the principal, rotated sharing beds with teachers on camps, and endured a surveillance-heavy culture. The Communities & Justice Department received 15 risk-of-significant-harm notifications since 2004 without triggering a field assessment.
Foreign Minister Penny Wong condemned the Houthi strikes that killed at least 12, saying “the lives of so many innocent people” had been stolen, as Australia upgraded its travel advice following the escalation against Riyadh's airport.
The latest from Chansiri (of Ickle and Ama, the 2025 Good Food Guide Critics' Pick) opened 12 Oct in Surry Hills. Head chef Min Poohmin moves over from Ama; many recipes are adapted from Wongswadiwat's Laotian mother Muay Nattapon's kitchen.
A 35-seat Korean broth (gomtang) bar from chef Jay Lee, ex-head chef of the closed CBD fine-diner Soul Dining, opened for lunch 12 Oct. Separately, cult Darlinghurst restaurant Joe's Table announced a new dining concept in Macquarie Park for next year.
A new hatted hit in the former Moon Park site from an ex-Baba's Place head chef and an Automata alum. The summer-friendly wine list was put together with input from South End's Paul Guiney; Bar Demo's Olly Churcher did the cocktails.
Wine Communicators of Australia honoured Wolf Blass AM as 2026 South Australian “Legend of the Vine” at the Royal Adelaide Wine Show (9 Oct). Separately, Wine Australia launched a competition for sommeliers and on-trade/off-trade buyers to win a two-week trade trip to Australia in Oct–Nov 2026 — squarely in RSN territory.
Closing today (13 Oct): the Contemporary Music Touring Program (up to $50k for national tours), Music Australia Export Development Fund (up to $75k matched for international touring, plus $15k and $10k categories), Playing Australia Project Investment (regional/remote touring), the International Engagement Fund ($5k–$30k), the First Nations Arts d/Deaf & Disabilities Project Fund ($5k–$10k) and the National Songwriting & Recording in Schools Stimulus (up to $100k matched). Regional galleries also have the $40,000 Dobell Exhibition Grant due. If you or an artist you back has a project in flight, today is the cut-off.
Sixteen-plus years of fundraising later, the expanded gallery opens its doors with a roughly $145m collection and 1,600sqm of new exhibition space. Funding: $5m Australian Government + $5m NSW Government under the Regional Recovery Partnership, plus $13m from the Newcastle Art Gallery Foundation (Valerie & John Ryan bequest and Margaret Olley Trust). The “Iconic Love Unloved” exhibition debuts with almost 500 works.
Sixteen Australian artists scored Creative Australia Fellowships — the agency's flagship grants supporting an artist to take the next major step in their practice. Creative Australia reports $286m invested in Australian arts. (Context carries over from this week's $5.8m Creative Futures Fund round.)
Unveiled 12 Oct, capping a 14-month overhaul inside Meta Superintelligence Labs. Muse Wonder is pitched at agentic work, with “Active Memory” (across-conversation recall) and “Active Focus” (goal persistence). It's live on the Meta Model API and Muse Code; consumer tiers are $20/$100 per month. Independent benchmarks are still pending — and the frontier shifted fast in September with OpenAI and Anthropic releases.
OpenAI released 722 manuscripts (372 result families) from an unreleased frontier model, claiming progress on three of the five remaining Millennium Prize problems, including the Riemann hypothesis. Terence Tao's advisory group urged labs to stop testing closed models on advanced mathematics; many results are Lean-verified, but the model and prompts are withheld.
SpaceXAI (ex-xAI) shipped Grok 4.7 on 11 Oct — roughly an 87% jump on Terminal-Bench 4.0 (20.3→38.0%) while holding price at $2/$6 per million tokens. Still trailing Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 5.5 (70.6) and Opus 5.5 (66.4) on that benchmark.
Nous tagged v0.21.5 as a stable rollup — 1,610 commits, 460 merged PRs — alongside a big Desktop plugin SDK wave, Simple/Advanced interface mode, a new Connectors page, French/German/Spanish Catalogs, and GPT-6 Sol/Terra/Luna plus Claude Opus 5.5 in the Nous and OpenRouter catalogs. Full curated notes are deferred to v0.22.0. If you're on a git install, `hermes update` picks it up.
Solo dev Lu Yuxin's Gemma-4-12B GGUF builds (coding and agentic, distilled toward Fable 5-level reasoning) hit Hugging Face's trending list with hundreds of thousands of downloads; Q4_K_M is ~6.9GB and runs on ~7GB unified memory. Separately, Hugging Face's transformers now runs llama.cpp GGUF quants natively on Apple Silicon — relevant to running a capable local model at sea.