Monday, 5 August - Lifting me higher and higher

Make Mondays delicious with Marley Spoon

Good morning, it’s Monday, 5 August. In your Squiz Today…

• A magnifique Olympics weekend

• Riots rock the UK

• And decoding teen speak…

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Squiz Sayings

Said confirmed Democratic US presidential candidate Kamala Harris to the Republicans’ Donald Trump after he started mucking around with the debate schedule, opting to ditch an agreed date for an appearance with the friendly Fox News. Them’s fightin’ words...

A gold (and green) rush

The Squiz

A magnifique weekend for Australia has capped off our best-ever start to a summer Olympic Games. On Saturday, we breezed past the 11 gold medals we’d won by the Games’ halfway mark in Athens in 2004 - our previous record at the same point - and as we start today, we’re sitting pretty with 12 gold, 11 silver and 8 bronze. That puts us at fourth on the medal tally…

How have we pulled that off?

Talent, great performances, and a bit of luck… Cameron McEvoy - who’s known as ‘the Professor’ by teammates thanks to his physics/maths studies - won gold in the 50m freestyle sprint on Saturday - our first man to ever win in the 50m if you can believe it. And true to his nickname, there’s been a lot of scientific analysis of the ‘McEvoy Method’ he used to do so… Doubles pair Matt Ebden and John Peers locked in the second-ever gold we’ve won in tennis in Olympics history - in front of their delighted families. That brings us to our female athletes… Kaylee McKeown will go down in history as the first Aussie to win 4 individual Olympic gold medals after defending her 200m backstroke crown. And how about Saya Sakakibara, our BMX golden girl? Her backstory is worth a gold medal alone… 

Are we on track?

If things go well this week, our athletes could bring home the most gold medals we’ve ever won at an Olympic Games - pipping our previous record of 17. But whether we’ll win the 54 total medals we’re expected to is another thing… Data analytics company Nielsen’s real-time projections have us bringing home 15 gold, 23 silver and 16 bronze - so we’ll have to cross our fingers and see. In the meantime, you might like to have a browse through some of the best photos from the Games so far, or there’s always Team USA’s #1 supporter Snoop Dogg facing his fear of horses head-on… And as we did last week, the Paris Sprint will keep your talking points match-fit on the things that happened overnight and what to look forward to in the coming 24 hours. Pace yourself - the Olympics is a marathon, not a sprint…

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Squiz the Rest

The UK continues to be rocked by riots

That’s across multiple cities, and reports say more are planned in the coming days, prompting PM Keir Starmer to warn that police have been given the government’s "full support" to take action against "extremists" attempting to "sow hate". Over 140 people have been arrested and numerous police officers injured, sparked by last week’s deadly stabbing attack on a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in the holiday town of Southport. The worst behaviour has been blamed on far-right demonstrators spurred on by false information on social media that the attacker was a radical Muslim migrant. That's despite a UK court naming the 17yo suspect as British-born Axel Rudakubana. To put it in context, it’s the most widespread unrest in the country since 2011 when riots broke out after a black man was killed by police in North London. Overnight, Starmer condemned the "far-right thuggery" and said he’d do “whatever it takes” to bring the culprits to justice. 

Moving on from matters of the Heart… 

Northern Territorians are on holiday for Darwin Cup today, but it was no picnic for PM Anthony Albanese yesterday as he faced a grilling about what’s next for addressing Indigenous issues during the Garma Festival in remote northeast Arnhem Land. It's the first time the event's been held since the failed Voice to Parliament referendum, and it came days after new Closing the Gap data showed a slide in Indigenous wellbeing. Albanese says his commitment to First Nations people is “as strong as ever” but he won’t set up a ‘Truth and Justice Commission’ known as Makarrata as laid out in the Uluru Statement from the Heart. Yesterday he said he reckons it means “listening to and respecting First Nations people and then responding” and no promise has been broken. But advocates say it “was an election commitment” that is still “necessary”. 

A legion of unexplained infections

An outbreak of Legionnaires' disease that began in Melbourne last week has claimed the lives of 2 people - a man in his 60s and a woman in her 90s. It's a rare but severe form of bacterial pneumonia and there are now 77 confirmed cases, and 75 of those have required hospitalisation. That makes it the largest outbreak since 125 people were infected at Melbourne Aquarium back in 2000… Yesterday Victoria's Chief Health Officer Clare Looker said the outbreak may be slowing, and "hopefully we're seeing the tail of things." It’s thought the outbreak started in a water cooling tower in an industrial building somewhere around the western suburbs of Laverton North or Derrimut. Testing has been carried out on 54 of 100 local towers, but Looker warns the source may never be found.

Yeet, no cap my words are bussin

It’s easy to feel Clueless about what teenage girls are saying with their ever-altering slang, but new research says they're “the accelerators of linguistic change and progress"... Like it or not, linguistics Professor Sali Tagliamonte says if you sit near a group of girls on public transport you’ll hear “the future of language in your community", and she reckons girls are at least a generation ahead of young men. That’s because they have "an innate linguistic ability that's superior" and when they’re not as economically powerful as boys, they use language as capital. And it’s not a new conclusion - over 20 years ago the founder of modern sociolinguistics studies William Labov also observed that women lead 90% of linguistic change. So if you are keeping up, you totally ate that, you sigma rizzler…

Apropos of nothing

Nothing says ‘ageing rocker’ like Jimmy Barnes needing to undergo hip surgery, forcing him to postpone some solo tour dates over the next 2 months. The 68yo had a “twinge” that turned into full-on pain, and the hope is he’ll be back on deck in time for Cold Chisel’s scheduled shows from October… 

Toowoomba and South Korea - neither are places we’d normally associate with pasta but a seafood dish called ‘Toowoomba pasta’ created by Australian-themed American restaurant chain Outback Steakhouse has taken the Asian nation by storm. Umm someone should tell them the regional Queensland city isn’t on the coast…

Adelaide moggy George must have gone through a few of his 9 lives during his 2.5 year absence… He has been reunited with his owner after a good samaritan found him hiding in a drainpipe. Perhaps he was playing the world’s longest ever game of cat and mouse?

🏊🏼‍♀️ The Paris Sprint

Each day of the Paris Olympics we’ll bring you 3 of the top stories from the action overnight and 3 events to put on your radar for the coming day. 

The Dolphins wrapped up the last night of the Olympic swimming with 2 silver medals - the first for Meg Harris in the 50m freestyle, coming in 0.26 seconds behind world record holder Swede Sarah Sjöström. And we had another Mollie moment when Mollie O’Callaghan took us from fourth to a silver medal in her leg of the women’s 4x100m relay. Australia has won gold or silver in this event at every Olympics since 1992 - this year, it was America’s turn for gold. Our men’s relay team finished sixth.

Our Aussie women have soared their way to silver and bronze medals in the high jump, with Nicola Olyslagers winning her second silver Olympic medal. Known for scoring her own attempts in a journal in between jumps, Olyslagers couldn’t match the world record holder, Ukrainian Yaroslava Mahuchikh, who spent her downtime cosy inside a sleeping bag between attempts. Aussie Eleanor Patterson won bronze, shared with Ukrainian Iryna Gerashchenko. 

It’s always one of the most talked about races in the Olympics and this year’s 100m men’s sprint final didn’t disappoint. The fastest man on the planet - in one of the closest finishes in Olympic history - is America’s Noah Lyles who won the gold by 0.005 seconds over Jamaica’s Kishane Thompson. The women’s 100m gold was claimed by Julien Alfred of St Lucia who won the tiny Caribbean nation its first-ever Olympic medal. 

And champion paddler Jess Fox’s dream of a golden trifecta in Paris is over after she crashed out of the kayak cross heat against her little sister Noemie overnight. After the race, Jess said: "I'm gutted, but at the same time, when you see your little sister (Noemie) win the heat, I was really proud of her." Noemie will next race in the quarterfinals tonight.

Squiz the Day

Picnic Day public holiday (NT)

8.30am (AEST) - The Australian Institute of Digital Health is holding the Health, Innovation and Community conference - Brisbane

10.00am (AEST) - Aid agencies and federal government departments to appear before a Senate committee hearing into Australia’s support for Ukraine - Canberra

10.00am (AEST) - The final hearing for the independent inquiry into the MRH-90 Taipan helicopter crash will begin (until 16 August) - Sydney

11.30am (AEST) - Archibald Prize 2024 People's Choice Award announced - Sydney 

RBA monetary policy meeting begins (on until 6 August)

Landcare Week begins

2024 Darwin Cup

Start of Homelessness Prevention Week (until 11 August) 

State of Loneliness Awareness Week (until 11 August)

Start of Dental Health Week (until 11 August) 

International Traffic Light Day

Anniversary of:

• the birthdays of Joseph Merrick aka ‘The Elephant Man’ (1862), former PM Harold Holt (1908), and first man on the moon Neil Armstrong (1930)

• the deaths of Marilyn Monroe (1962),Toni Morrison (2019) and Judith Durham (2022)

• Humphrey Gilbert claiming Newfoundland for Britain - the first English colony in North America and the beginning of the British Empire (1583)

• the capture of Nelson Mandela. He would spend the next 27 years in prison in South Africa (1962)

• the Indian Government announcing it would change the status of Indian-controlled Kashmir from a state to a union territory (2019)

• Former Pakistani PM Imran Khan sentenced to 3 years in jail after being found guilty of “corrupt practices” (2023)