Welcome, readers, to Afternoon Update.
Stephen Heydt woke up on Saturday, put on a T-shirt, hobbled out the door with the aid of a walking stick and spoke at a rally in the middle of Brisbane – where he was promptly arrested by a large and heavily armed contingent of police. The shirt read “Jews for a free Palestine from the river to the sea”.
“I was wearing a T-shirt which displayed the six-word phrase which I can’t say, and I gave a speech using the six-word phrase which I can’t say,” Heydt said. For his choice of words and wardrobe, the 73-year-old Jewish clinical psychologist became one of the first people in Queensland charged under new laws designed to crack down on antisemitic hate speech.
The criminal lawyer Terry O’Gorman said the events of the weekend harken back to the dark days of police repression under the corrupt former Queensland premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen. But speaking to the press on Sunday, the premier, David Crisafulli, said the laws were designed to strike a “balance” that allowed protest but stamped out phrases that amounted to a call for genocide – and directly linked those words to the terror attack at Bondi.
Top news
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Madonna offers reward after vintage Coachella costume goes missing
In pictures
Cartoonist Fiona Katauskas asks: “Who’s really putting the heat on the budget bottom line?
“It’s not just the inflation dragon who’s fired up.”
What they said …
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“We’ve been sold out” – Punters Politics
Konrad Benjamin, a former school teacher who is behind the social media account Punters Politics, tells a Senate inquiry into taxing gas that the issue has fired up his near million followers. Benjamin warns the parliament that “politicians ignore just how much we’re paying attention to this at their own peril”.
Full Story
A homeless man died in public in Sydney. How did his death go unnoticed?
The strange and lonely death of Bikram Lama exposes a glaring gap in homelessness services. Reged Ahmad speaks with Guardian Australia’s chief investigations correspondent, Christopher Knaus, about the hopes and dreams that brought Lama to Australia – and what went wrong.
Before bed read
Fraudsters are using the promise of fake roles to trick job-seekers out of money, personal information or both, and with the help of AI they are more convincing than ever. But there are ways to spot them. The Guardian’s Victoria Turk shows you how.
Daily word game
Today’s starter word is: POTS. You have five goes to get the longest word including the starter word. Play Wordiply.
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