The Left-Wing Radicals Have Left the Building

Two delegations walked out during Donald Trump’s speech at the United Nations: Iran’s and Cuba’s. Which is quite a feat, really. Most people who find Trump unbearable can turn off the television. These people had to get up, gather their papers and leave while the cameras were rolling.

Trump’s speech covered Iran, Cuba, drug cartels and his familiar warning that communism must never reach America. Iran’s delegation walked out as he spoke about military strikes against their country; Cuba’s left during his remarks about its government. Calling them all “left-wing radicals” makes a wonderfully punchy headline, but it does rather flatten the detail. Iran and Cuba were protesting different things.

I’m not going to pretend I’d enjoy being trapped in a room listening to Trump for 37 minutes. He can turn a speech about world affairs into something that sounds like a man arguing with every country at a very large family Christmas. But I do wonder what a walkout achieves, apart from giving him a fresh audience reaction to talk about.

Then again, staying seated and looking furious would have given the cameras something too. Perhaps that’s the problem with a Trump speech: whatever you do, you’re part of the show. The only person guaranteed to enjoy the spectacle is Trump.

Killed By Someone Who Was Supposed to Love Her...

Another three women are dead.

And, once again, the person accused of killing her is not some stranger lurking in a dark alley. It is someone she knew. Someone she trusted. Someone who may once have told her that he loved her.

How does love become this?

It doesn’t, of course. Because this isn’t love. It is ownership dressed up as love. It is jealousy passed off as passion. It is control disguised as concern.

Where are you going? Who are you talking to? Why are you wearing that? Why didn’t you answer your phone?

At first, it can almost sound flattering. He wants to know where she is because he worries about her. He doesn’t like her friends because they are a bad influence. He controls the money because he is “better with it.” He checks her phone because he has been hurt before.

Slowly, her life becomes smaller while his control becomes bigger.

Then, if she tries to leave, the danger can escalate. She is no longer obeying. She is no longer his to supervise. And for a man who believes love means ownership, her independence feels like humiliation.

That is one of the ugliest answers to the question: why are so many women killed by people who are supposed to love them?

Because some men have never learned that a woman is a person, not a possession. She is allowed to leave. She is allowed to fall out of love. She is allowed to make decisions he doesn’t like. She is allowed to live a life that does not include him.

On average, one Australian woman is killed every nine days by a current or former partner. Worldwide, an estimated 51,100 women and girls were killed by partners or family members in 2023. For many women, the most dangerous place is not the street. It is their own home.

And we still ask why she stayed.

Why didn’t she leave earlier? Why did she go back? Why didn’t she report him? Why didn’t she see what he was capable of?

Perhaps she did.

Perhaps she knew exactly what he was capable of - and that was why she was terrified to leave.

Leaving may mean having nowhere to live, no money, frightened children and a partner who has threatened to kill her, himself, the children or the family pet. It may mean being stalked, tracked through her phone, harassed at work or dragged through endless court proceedings. A piece of paper saying he must stay away is useful only if he decides to obey it - or someone stops him when he doesn’t.

Meanwhile, women are told to change their behaviour. Don’t walk alone. Don’t drink too much. Don’t date the wrong man. Keep evidence. Pack an emergency bag. Change your passwords. Turn off location tracking. Tell a friend. Have an escape plan.

Women are expected to become full-time security experts while the violent man continues doing exactly as he pleases.

We need to stop treating these killings as inexplicable explosions from otherwise loving men. In many cases, the murder is the end of a long history of coercion, threats, stalking, intimidation and violence. The signs were there. The woman may have reported them. Her family may have seen them. Police, courts or support services may have known about them.

Then she is killed and everyone says, “Nobody could have imagined this.”

Women imagined it. They were simply not believed strongly enough.

This is not about claiming that every man is violent. Most men are not. It is about recognising that most violence against women is committed by men, and that silence helps the violent ones hide among the decent ones.

Good men need to be part of this conversation too. They need to challenge the mate who talks about his ex as though she deserves punishment. They need to stop laughing at jokes about controlling women. They need to teach boys that rejection is painful, not fatal; that jealousy is not love; and that losing a relationship does not mean losing ownership—because ownership should never have existed in the first place.

A woman should not need a carefully planned escape route from someone who once promised to love her.

She should not have to die before we finally believe she was in danger.

And we should stop calling it love when what we really mean is control.

I don't know about you, but the land of Secretwomen.org is looking good!!

She Went to Mexico to Study. She Should Have Come Home...

Claudia Tacoronte Aguilera was 21. She had travelled from Spain to Mexico on a university exchange and had been there less than a month when she was stabbed to death in Cuautla. She was studying early childhood education. I keep thinking about that: a young woman preparing to work with children, with her own life still barely begun.

The circumstances are still being investigated. Authorities are treating her death as a suspected femicide, while reports have also raised the possibility of a robbery. I don’t want to pretend we know exactly what happened when Claudia’s family is still waiting for answers. But we know enough to be furious. She went to a cultural event and never came home.

After a young woman is killed, there is always a rush to inspect her decisions. Why was she there? Was she alone? Should she have gone somewhere else? As though every woman can avoid violence by making a sufficiently clever series of choices. Claudia was on a university exchange. She should have been able to enjoy it, make friends, learn things, and return home with stories her family would hear for years.

Now her family has a story no family should ever have to tell. Students in Mexico have held a vigil for her, and the University of Granada has cancelled upcoming exchange placements to Morelos. Those responses show how deeply her death has shaken people. They cannot give Claudia back her future.

I hope the investigation gives her family clear answers and real justice. And I hope that, amid the headlines and the arguments about what women should do to stay safe, we remember who Claudia was: a 21-year-old student who went abroad to begin another chapter of her life. She deserved the chance to finish it.

I Have Muscles!

I’ve been going to Kieser for about three months now. Kieser is a gym of sorts, although it’s not filled with twenty-year-olds wearing crop tops and admiring themselves in mirrors. It is mostly filled with older people. Quite a lot of them look half dead.

I fit in beautifully.

We shuffle from one machine to another, carrying various injuries, replaced joints and body parts that have simply stopped cooperating. Knees don’t bend. Arms don’t lift. Backs complain. Legs drag behind like reluctant children. Nobody is trying to become an Instagram fitness influencer. Most of us would simply like to get out of a chair without making a noise.

The machines are very controlled. You sit down, adjust everything, push or pull something heavy and try not to look alarmed. Then you rest while pretending you’re not completely exhausted. Nobody leaps around shouting encouragement. There is no thumping music or Lycra parade. It is all terribly civilised.

When I started, several parts of my body seemed to be purely decorative. My legs had forgotten they were supposed to contain muscles, and my balance remained committed to keeping life interesting. I wasn’t expecting miracles. I thought perhaps I might become slightly less creaky.

But something rather shocking has happened.

I have muscles.

Actual muscles.

I noticed them in my legs first. There are definite shapes where previously there was just leg. When I tense them, things happen. Parts of my body that have been missing in action for years appear to have received the memo and reported back for duty.

I’m not about to enter a bodybuilding competition. Nobody will be rubbing oil on me and asking me to pose under bright lights. But after years of nerve damage, muscle wasting and bits of me refusing to move properly, seeing even a little muscle return feels enormous.

Kieser may look like a waiting room filled with people who have wandered in looking for the cardiologist, but it works. Quietly, slowly and without anybody yelling, “Feel the burn!”

At our age, we already feel the burn. We feel it getting out of bed.

Still, after three months, I’m stronger. I’m moving better. And underneath all the damage and disobedient body parts, apparently I still have muscles waiting to make a comeback.

Who knew?

The People Who Built AI Are Now Looking for the Off Switch

One of the co-founders of Anthropic, the company behind the AI system Claude, has suggested that powerful artificial intelligence may eventually need a compulsory “kill switch.” Not a polite little log out button. Not “Would you like to save your changes?” An actual emergency mechanism that can shut the whole thing down if AI becomes dangerous or starts behaving in ways nobody can control.

That is reassuring.

It is rather like the inventor of the chainsaw announcing, after selling several million of them, that perhaps everyone should also be issued with a very large sticking plaster.

The people developing AI have spent years telling us how magnificent it will be. It will cure diseases, solve climate change, write computer code, drive our cars, run businesses and possibly fold a fitted sheet. 

I'm a child of the 60's. Didn't these idiots every see 'The Terminator"? And it's believable. Oh not the going back from the future to try to fix things; but that AI will some day turn on us...

Now some of those people that wanted us to use it, are warning that it could become uncontrollable, improve itself beyond our understanding and pose a serious threat to humanity.

Suddenly, the sales presentation has taken a turn.

I use AI regularly. It helps me write, organise ideas, create pictures and answer questions I would otherwise spend three hours Googling before ending up watching a video about a woman renovating a caravan in Finland. I like AI. It saves me a fortune! Whereas once I believed the crappy add for sticking plasters that are going to fix my bent figures or my toe hump; now I ask AI (who 9 out of 10 times says it's crap).

I also like my toaster, and I would become suspicious if the toaster started rewriting its own software and locking me out of the kitchen.

The proposed switch would apparently need to be independently verified, which makes sense. We probably shouldn’t leave it entirely to the companies racing one another to build the most powerful AI on Earth. That would be like asking the greyhounds to supervise the rabbit.

Of course, creating a kill switch is the easy part. Deciding who gets to press it is another matter. Governments? Technology companies? The United Nations? Elon Musk after a difficult afternoon? And what happens if the AI has already read the instruction manual and quietly disconnected the button?

Perhaps we are worrying unnecessarily. AI may remain an extremely useful tool that helps humanity rather than destroys it. At present, its main crimes seem to be inventing references, giving people six fingers and confidently providing recipes containing ingredients that don’t exist.

Still, I’m in favour of the switch.

Make it enormous. Paint it bright red. Put it behind glass and write BREAK IN CASE THE COMPUTER DECIDES HUMANS ARE INEFFICIENT across the front.

And perhaps don’t connect it to Wi-Fi.