Australians who burn the national flag or deface war memorials could face prison under a new Coalition proposal that would also raise the bar for any future move to shift Australia Day from January 26.

Opposition Leader Angus Taylor announced the proposed Australian National Symbols and Heritage Protection Bill on Sunday, saying the nation’s key symbols, commemorative sites and historic memorials deserve tougher protections in federal law.

Under the plan, a new Commonwealth offence would apply to the serious public desecration of the Australian flag in cases where a person is reckless about whether their conduct could incite hatred or violence, threaten public order or trigger a public disturbance.

‘People are welcome to make political statements on Australia and they can criticise Australia all they like but burning the flag goes a step further,’ Taylor told news24.

‘It is a symbol, it is part of our nation and our heritage that really matters. And I know Australians feel very strongly about this.’

‘To see it being burnt is unacceptable to most Australians and certainly unacceptable to me. And I think it’s appropriate that a penalty of up to a year imprisonment is established.’

The Coalition would also introduce tough new federal offences carrying jail terms for deliberately damaging, defacing or desecrating war memorials, statues, plaques and other monuments honouring Australia’s history.

The announcement follows a string of incidents across Victoria and Queensland in recent months. 

In western Victoria, a war memorial in Dobie was vandalised, with a plaque honouring local veterans stolen, political graffiti sprayed across the site and surrounding vegetation damaged.

The attack came just weeks after vandals struck the century-old Beaufort war memorial, painting slogans such as ‘death to Australia’ and ‘death to the ADF’ on the monument.

Earlier this year, Melbourne’s 155-year-old Pioneer Monument in Flagstaff Gardens was also vandalised and covered with anti-Australian graffiti.

On Australia Day, an Australian flag was set alight during an ‘Invasion Day’ protest in Brisbane.

Taylor said Australians were becoming increasingly frustrated by attacks on national symbols and memorials.

MORE STORY: Pete Hegseth vs. Dan Driscoll: Inside Their Bitter Feud

‘Australians are rightly proud of our country, its history and what generations of Australians have built together,’ he said.

‘Our flag represents the country we love. Our war memorials honour Australians who put their lives on the line for us. And Australia Day is our national day that unites us all.’

He said the Coalition would not allow important national symbols to be diminished.

‘These things belong to the Australian people and they should not be torn down, smashed, desecrated, or quietly stripped of their significance,’ Taylor said.

‘The Coalition will protect these symbols and memorials and we won’t be shy in standing up for the national pride that we should all feel for our great country.’

The legislation would also entrench Australia Day on January 26 in Commonwealth law, meaning any future change would require approval through a national plebiscite.

Shadow Attorney-General Michaelia Cash argued the reforms would strike a balance between free speech and protecting national heritage.

‘Freedom of speech is fundamental in Australia, but freedom of speech does not mean freedom to destroy,’ Cash said.

‘There is a clear difference between making a political argument and taking a can of spray paint to the names of Australians who fought and died for this country.’

Shadow minister and Army veteran Phillip Thompson said attacks on war memorials deeply affected veterans, serving personnel and their families.

‘When someone paints “death to the ADF” across a war memorial, Australians know instinctively that something is badly wrong,’ he said.

‘Those memorials carry the names of ordinary Australians who left their homes, their families and their communities to serve our country. Many never came home.

‘We will make sure there are real consequences.’

The Coalition has yet to release the full details of the proposed penalties, but says the new laws would provide stronger protections for Australia’s flag, war memorials, monuments, plaques and other sites of national significance.

A Pennsylvania State University student accused by authorities of playing a leading role in a cocaine operation was photographed being reunited with his parents after they posted his bail.

Agostino Abbatiello, 24, was embraced by his father, Mario, as he walked out of the Centre County Correctional Facility in Pennsylvania on Thursday evening, according to exclusive Daily Mail photos.

Mario was seen tenderly holding his smiling son’s face during the emotional reunion.

After appearing in court in red jail clothing, Abbatiello left the facility wearing a rumpled blue suit and white shirt, carrying a clear bag containing his belongings.

His mother, Danielle, also appeared overjoyed to see the embattled accounting student, wrapping him in a tight hug moments after his release.

The couple paid the $250,000 bail on their credit card to free their son from jail and are believed to have driven him home to their sleek $1.4 million Long Island home after Wednesday’s hearing.  

Abbatiello has been held at Centre County since August over claims he sold multiple kilos of the drug.

His Venmo showed $116,000 of payments had been paid to him and that he had paid out $194,000 using the same app, Centre County Court heard Wednesday.

Venmo is used for electronic payments and does not record any cash transactions that people may also choose to make.

Abbatiello faces felony charges of multiple counts of possession with intent to deliver and conspiracy. He has yet to enter a plea to those counts. 

He was identified by authorities as the alleged kingpin of a cocaine trafficking operation months after co-defendant Thomas Robinson was arrested in December 20234

Robinson cooperated with a grand jury investigation and identified Abbatiello as the main supplier of the cocaine tied to campus fraternities. He waived his right to a preliminary hearing on Wednesday.

Despite Abbatiello’s parents sitting in the front row at the Centre County Courthouse in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, on Wednesday, he appeared jittery.

Mario, who runs an asphalt business, and his wife, Danielle, the CEO of Deco Home Hogar Inteligente, sat beside each other with sphinx-like neutral expressions as sheriffs flanked their son into the court room in handcuffs, shackles and a red jump suit.

Abbatiello sat in the courtroom with an almost-scowl like expression as he anxiously waited for the proceedings to begin.

The alleged drug dealer fidgeted with his handcuffs, moving them up and down on his wrists.

A quick smile rushed across his face, likely when he locked eyes with his loyal parents, before he was escorted to the defense table, wobbling a bit as he walked with his feet shackled together.

Abbatiello stared at the ceiling, rocked back-and-forth in his chair, and stretched his neck as his collegiate peers testified about the details of his alleged crimes.

The only possible crack in the dean’s list student’s facade came during testimony from Abbatiello’s ‘close friend’ and fraternity brother, Lars Zeepvat, about an alleged drug sale said to have been carried out in the presence of Abbatiello’s younger brother.

Zeepvat told the court how the trio had gone out to get food but stopped at the nearby Delta Upsilon fraternity along the way.

A Delta Upsilon brother, believed to be Robinson, got into the car and ‘Augie gave him a brown bag, which I believed was cocaine,’ Zeepvat said, using a nickname for Abbatiello. 

Robinson is believed to have handed Abbatiello a bag of money, the court heard.

Abbatiello looked down at the defense table and bowed his head as Zeepvat testified about the alleged exchange. The defense has not commented on Zeepvat’s allegation.

The suspected cocaine kingpin grew up in the ritzy suburb of Westbury with his father, mother and two younger siblings.

The three children were ‘all taken care of, spoon-fed,’ a neighbor told Fox News in the days following his arrest. ‘They weren’t the kind of kids to take the garbage out or shovel the snow.’

Another community member described the family as ‘pretty nice people.’ 

Abbatiello was seemingly a star student throughout his entire academic career.

He amassed a collection of outstanding achievement awards in middle school and was inducted into the National Honor Society as a high schooler, according to a photograph shared on his mother’s Facebook page.

He attended Chaminade High School, a prestigious all-boys private Catholic school in Long Island that charges $20,000-a-year, where he played football for two years.

His academic success continued throughout his collegiate career and saw him graduate from Penn State in May 2024 with an accounting degree and a 3.3 GPA.

He also made the Dean’s List for three consecutive semesters, according to a since-deleted blog post on the university’s website. 

Abbatiello became a hotshot across campus Greek Life after he rushed unsanctioned Sigma Chi as a sophomore in 2021, Zeepvat testified. Sigma Chi operates outside of the university and is not recognized as an official student organization.

He, Zeepvat and two friends would drive to Philadelphia to purchase cocaine for personal consumption amongst the frat, the court heard.

By their junior year, business ‘started to ramp up’ and the pair were selling drugs to Sigma Chi, Zeepvat said.

Their Philadelphia-based dealer ghosted them and Abbatiello reached out to RJ, a cocaine dealer in Long Island who he knew from high school, the court heard.

‘First time he purchased from RJ it was the most we’ve ever seen and it was 100 grams,’ Zeepvat testified in court.

‘Agostino brought back the coke the first time he went to New York and put it on the social room table [at the frat house] for everyone to see. People were enamored with how much it was.’

The pair consumed some of the cocaine themselves, while also selling bags of it for $60 to $120 each, Zeepvat testified.

Abbatiello’s business was quickly booming. He started selling cocaine to Thomas Robinson, a member of Penn State’s Delta Upsilon fraternity, and other fraternities by the end of junior year, the court heard.

During their senior year, Abbatiello was dealing larger amounts of cocaine, became flashy with his money, and started referring to himself as the Godfather, Zeepvat testified.

‘I knew Augie was making more. He started buying more clothes, had a different wardrobe,’ he told the court.

‘There was one thing he bought over the summer, between my junior and senior year, a very extravagant purchase, a $5,000 bong to smoke cannabis in.’ 

He added that Abbatiello’s gambling habit picked up, claiming he was betting ‘hands of anywhere from $1,000 to $2,000 – a max of $8,000 to $10,000.’

‘After the 100 gram purchase things shifted. It was no longer to get high with your friends. I saw a difference in Augie. He started selling for money and for popularity.’ 

Abbatiello was working as a financial advisor in Boca Raton, Florida, at the time of his arrest, his lawyer told his pre-trial hearing on Wednesday. 

Per the conditions of his bail, Abbatiello has surrendered his passport and will be residing in Long Island with his parents for the foreseeable future.

He must remain sober, is barred from contacting any witnesses in his case, and must be driven to and from all future court proceedings by his parents. They also must maintain a weapon-free home.

‘It’s a good day for us,’ his attorney Philip Masorti told the media outside the courthouse Wednesday.

He explained that after the preliminary hearing, Mario and Danielle met with a bail bondsman at his office and paid the premium to free their son. A condition of Abbatiello’s bail was that no illegally-obtained money could be used to fund it.

‘If any of you have kids, it’s not very pleasant, sometimes parents do that and certainly that happened,’ he said.

‘So we were able to come back down and explain to the court that he posted the bond and the sources of the funds were not from illegal activity but rather from the parents’ credit card.’

Fourteen people have been charged in connection to the alleged Penn State drug trafficking ring, the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office said.

Zeepvat and Robert Zanolla, both of whom were in Sigma Chi, and Delta Upsilon brothers Thomas Robinson and Mohammed Huraibi have also been charged with felonies over the alleged drug ring. 

All four waived their preliminary hearings. Zeepvat, Robinson and Huraibi all took the stand to testify against Abbatiello on Wednesday.

Paul Robinson, Thomas Robinson’s father, was charged with felony tampering, hindering apprehension for taking steps to conceal evidence, including a safe containing drugs and cash, and obstructing the investigation. 

Eight other defendants facing misdemeanors have preliminary hearings scheduled for October. 

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth was attending a White House reception when news began circulating privately about yet another high-level exit from the Trump administration.

Army Secretary Dan Driscoll submitted his resignation to President Donald Trump after months of mounting pressure from Hegseth, according to four sources familiar with the relationship who spoke to the Daily Mail. The move brought an end to an internal feud that sources described as increasingly personal, bitter and vindictive.

Driscoll’s decision followed his complaints to Trump that Hegseth’s aggressive approach had pushed out key officials he believed were essential to advancing his planned military reforms. Trump offered Driscoll the option of remaining in the post through the midterm elections, but Driscoll opted to leave earlier.

Driscoll publicly confirmed his resignation Tuesday night, describing his time in the role as “the honor of a lifetime” and expressing gratitude to Army soldiers for their service and sacrifice.

“They have inspired me every day,” he said.

Although Driscoll thanked Hegseth for his ‘support,’ of his reforms, the Secretary of War did not respond in kind. 

Driscoll’s friendship with Vance was widely seen as the catalyst for landing the Army job after Trump’s re-election.

‘That never sat right with Hegseth,’ one source familiar with the conflict told the Daily Mail.

Vance and Driscoll’s friendship goes back to Yale in 2011, when Vance, a Marine veteran, invited younger veterans like Driscoll, who served in Army combat, out for pizza to brief them on what to expect. 

Driscoll and his wife Cassie became family friends of the Vances, and the couples have vacationed together.

Fast forward 15 years, now both found themselves in a knife-fight with an ambitious and unlikely Pentagon leader. 

Hegseth slowly came to suspect Driscoll was ‘acting like an independent power’, a Washington source familiar with their relationship said, and grew increasingly ‘paranoid,’ according to another. 

The friction turned sharp when Trump asked Driscoll, not Hegseth, to help negotiate an end to the war between Russia and Ukraine, handing the Army Secretary a direct line to the Oval Office that ran around his own boss. 

The two men never fit together. Hegseth was brash and aggressive, shoving aside anyone he suspected of disloyalty. Driscoll built alliances with the Army’s generals.

‘It was like putting two scorpions in a box,’ a source familiar with the relationship told the Daily Mail.

Before long, each suspected the other of knifing him in the media. 

The Pentagon has been investigating leaks in response to negative news coverage about Hegseth’s leadership since last year, and just this week it was reported that dozens of members of the US military’s Joint Staff had been subjected to polygraph tests over suspected leaks.

During his tenure, Driscoll’s allies believed that Hegseth’s team was feeding damaging material about him to right-wing influencers to poison his standing with the president.

In April, details surfaced online of Driscoll’s wife donating to Democratic Congresswoman Maggie Goodlander, who is married to Jake Sullivan, Joe Biden’s national security adviser.

A photo of Driscoll jogging with Democratic Congressman Eugene Vindman became another flashpoint. Vindman was among the officials who raised alarms over Trump’s call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, which triggered Trump’s first impeachment.

Then came Laura Loomer. The right-wing influencer accused Driscoll of ‘constant screw ups’ and of ‘orchestrating a coup’ against Hegseth, posts Driscoll’s allies read as a campaign to force him out, or at least bring him to heel.

The Department of War denies Hegseth or his team had any hand in the leaks.

The fight never stayed between the two men. It bled into Hegseth’s relationship with the vice president, two sources told the Daily Mail.

Vance and Hegseth have long differed over the use of military force, a split laid bare in the leaked ‘Signalgate’ chat among Trump officials over strikes on Yemen. Vance counseled caution about triggering a broader conflict with Iran, while Hegseth played cheerleader.

Then Hegseth delivered what sounded like a stump speech in Iowa in the middle of that conflict.

‘He was trying to get ahead of Vance,’ one Vance ally told the Daily Mail.

Reports that Hegseth is weighing a presidential run, published by NBC News last weekend, only added to the tension, though Hegseth has denied any interest in a presidential bid.

Yet inside the White House, officials joke about ‘President Pete,’ a source familiar with those conversations said.

‘He’s giving speeches at campaign rallies. It looks like he’s plotting to run himself,’ said Kevin Carroll, a retired Army Reserve colonel who served in the Office of the Secretary of War.

A Hegseth campaign would put him directly against Vance, and some in the administration read the Driscoll fight as the first casualty of that ambition.

‘If the Secretary of Defense wants to run for president against the Vice President, I guess you have to take out an ally of the Vice President who’s serving in the service right in front of you,’ one former Department of War official said.

Both offices reject it.

‘It’s clear these ‘sources’ have no idea what they are talking about. The Vice President and Secretary Hegseth are close friends working in lockstep to execute the President’s national security priorities,’ a spokesperson for Vance’s office told the Daily Mail.

Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said the two were ‘100 percent united in executing President Trump’s America First agenda,’ dismissing a story ‘fueled by anonymous sources’ as an attempt to ‘sow division where none exists.’

Asked Thursday about a possible Hegseth campaign, Vance said any Republican thinking of running should be ‘focused on the midterms.’ He called Driscoll and Hegseth both friends, said both were good at their jobs, and backed the Secretary of War’s push for a ‘culture shift’ at the Pentagon.

Privately, a former Trump official said, Vance sympathized with his friend’s reasons for leaving but never challenged Hegseth’s leadership. The two share most of the same allies in Washington and work in tandem, another source said.

But Driscoll continued to draw Hegseth’s wrath for actions that he believed were outside of the Secretary of the Army’s purview. 

Driscoll also resisted Hegseth’s demands to remove Army generals in his orbit. 

So Hegseth moved without him. He has so far removed or stopped the promotions of at least 80 generals, admirals and other officials, the New York Times reports. 

In April 2026, while Driscoll was on a family vacation in North Carolina, Hegseth forced out Army Chief of Staff General Randy George, Army Transformation and Training Command chief General David Hodne, and Major General William Green Jr, the chief of chaplains.

They were not the first, and they were not the last. General James Mingus was pushed out last fall. General Christopher Donahue, head of US Army Europe and Africa, was forced into early retirement in June.

The Army is now down to five four-star generals on active duty, from ten when Hegseth arrived at the Pentagon.

Firing Driscoll himself was never on the table. Driscoll’s friendship with the vice president protected him, and the White House told Hegseth outright that removing him was not an option, a former White House official told the Daily Mail. 

But Hegseth and his allies could still make his life miserable. The mockery had a bitter edge, because Driscoll was popular. 

Appointed at 38, he won over Department of War staff fast.

‘Driscoll had an amazing reputation. I think, ultimately, there’s a difference between looking the part and doing the part, and Driscoll got results,’ a former military officer told the Daily Mail.

Behind his back, Hegseth’s allies seized on interviews in which Driscoll said he ‘desperately’ hoped his seven-year-old daughter Laya would one day pass the Army Ranger course. They cast the wish as ‘woke.’

They also circulated a video of Driscoll as a young second lieutenant in Iraq wishing his family ‘Happy Holidays’ rather than Merry Christmas.

That was the last straw, sources told the Daily Mail, and Driscoll began looking for an exit.

Driscoll, through the Department of Army, did not respond to a Daily Mail request for comment. 

His departure has become a rallying point for Department of War employees worn down by Hegseth’s leadership, and some are beginning to push back. 

Retiring Republican Senator Thom Tillis used the occasion to call on Trump to replace his Secretary of War.

It is reaching the ranks, too. Many soldiers cheered Hegseth’s appointment. That is changing, a source told the Daily Mail.

‘At the end of the day, a lot of the stuff that happens in DC is not something that we feel, because the leaders try to shield the force,’ a former military officer said. ‘They are feeling it now.’

Some acts sit beyond the reach of ordinary understanding. Among the most unthinkable is the idea of a mother taking the lives of her own children.

It is that terrible incomprehensibility that has made the case of Lindsay Clancy, a former labor and delivery nurse from Massachusetts, so closely watched and so bitterly debated in the US and beyond. During a snowy evening in 2023, Clancy strangled her three young children with exercise bands, then cut her wrists and tried to end her own life by jumping from a bedroom window.

She survived the fall, though her children did not. Now paralysed and dependent on a wheelchair, she remains alive in circumstances many would see as a punishment of its own: trapped in the aftermath of a night that destroyed her family and condemned her to relive it for the rest of her life.

Yet the central question before the court was not whether the tragedy happened, but why. Clancy’s defence argued that she was in the grip of postpartum psychosis — her youngest child, Callan, was only eight months old. Prosecutors, however, said she acted with purpose, describing her conduct as deliberate, clear-headed and fast-moving in pursuit of one specific aim: to kill.

Inside the courtroom, Clancy wept repeatedly, at times so intensely that proceedings had to be paused by the judge. Outside, supporters travelled from across the United States, many dressed in pink, casting her as a symbol of medical failure and the wider neglect of mothers after childbirth. Postpartum psychosis is rare, affecting around two in every 1,000 women, but postnatal depression is far more widespread, with an estimated 10 to 15 per cent of new mothers affected.

Ultimately the jury – three men and nine women – were unable to reach a unanimous verdict, and the judge declared a mistrial. This means that Clancy could stand trial again – although lawyers for her ex-husband and the children’s father, Patrick Clancy, were keen to stress how traumatic the whole process had been for him and warned that the prospect ‘of reliving this tragedy through another trial is extraordinarily painful’.

It’s hard to see what purpose another trial would serve. Her guilt is not in question – it’s her motives that remain unclear. But either way, she will be forever reviled as a child killer. Lindsay Clancy’s life is effectively over.

But for Mr Clancy, the children’s father, his is not. He has since moved to New York and re-married, to a doctor who specialises in infertility treatment. In all aspects of this tragedy, he has been incredibly magnanimous towards his ex. ‘I wasn’t married to a monster – I was married to someone who got sick,’ he told an interviewer in 2024. He should be allowed to move on as best he can in peace.

This case has shone a light on the whole issue of postnatal depression, and of how it should be treated. Years ago, after I had my son, I was diagnosed with quite severe postnatal depression. Reading some of the extracts from Clancy’s journals, which were recovered from the family home in the aftermath of the killings, I shuddered, recognising many of her feelings.

The entries chronicled desperation, insomnia, ‘crazy brain fog’ and guilt. ‘I’m so desperate to get a mental break that my mind is trying to make something physically wrong with me,’ she wrote in 2022. Sleep-training Callan ‘just about killed me’, she noted. ‘I feel like I can’t make a plan. I can’t carry it out. Like I just live moment to moment,’ and ‘I’m drowning every day’.

I recognise those feelings all too well, even at a distance of over two decades. When my son was born, my daughter was just 16 months old: She struggled to adapt to the new arrival. He then became very ill, which led to all sorts of other difficulties. A combination of exhaustion, hormones, guilt and anxiety left me struggling both physically and mentally.

I remember joking to a friend that I was desperate for something to happen to me so I could have a ‘non-fatal hospitalisation’ and get a few nights’ proper sleep.

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I also remember how at times I would be seized by an almost uncontrollable rage. There were moments when I genuinely scared myself. I remember once, for example, being unable to get the children’s double buggy to unfold in a supermarket car park.

The children were crying in the back of the car, it was raining and I just suddenly reached the end of my tether. I smashed the buggy on to the Tarmac like a woman possessed. God knows what any passer-by must have thought. The tiniest thing would send me into a tailspin. I was a nightmare of neuroses.

But I was lucky: At a check-up, my GP picked up on my low mood. He asked if I was OK, and my emotional dam just burst. Not long after, I found myself in the office of a psychiatrist, who diagnosed a textbook case of postnatal depression. He told me sometimes in cases like mine he might recommend a period of removal from the children (the thought of which was like a knife to my heart) but that he did not think I was a danger to them. More, he said, a danger to myself.

With a combination of rest, medication and help from family and friends, I recovered. But I remember only too well how desolate I felt, how convinced I was that I was a total failure as a mother (and wife). Until then I had never had a day’s mental illness. Since then, the black dog has only ever been just around the corner.

I was lucky: I had the right professionals and the right support. It seems to me that Lindsay Clancy did not. At what point she went from being a struggling mum to a killer we may never know, but at some point her troubled mind somehow convinced itself that this was the best course of action.

Had she been properly diagnosed and treated, her children might not have paid the ultimate price. Their futures have been stolen. For the sake of their memory, it must never happen again.

I quite understand that Nigel Farage has not had an easy time of things lately, but he would do well to stop whingeing and blaming everyone else for his woes. If he wants to be prime minister, he has to accept a degree of scrutiny. Otherwise… well, you know what they say about heat and kitchens. 

How dare they troll dear Peter?

Last week Peter Hitchens and I celebrated the 80th edition of our podcast, Alas Vine And Hitchens. I suspect the reason we were first paired by the powers that be was because we are chalk and cheese. I am an eternal optimist, whereas Peter can be rather Eeyore-ish.

But despite our differences, I have become rather fond of him – which is why an incident a few days ago enraged me. Peter and I were standing in the street talking, when a well-heeled middle-aged man appeared from nowhere and slapped him on the shoulder. Startled, Peter sprang around, whereupon the fellow declared: ‘Your brother was much cleverer than you,’ and waltzed off, looking terribly smug. It’s the kind of thing that happens often on social media – but to see such vile trolling in real life was truly shocking. Do that again, sir, and you will have me to answer to.

Miriam Margolyes has a reputation for being outspoken, but even by her standards her latest outburst was shocking. In an interview with Andi Peters on ITV, she quizzed him about his lineage and then called him a ‘high yaller’ (aka ‘high yellow’), which is an old Southern American term for a black or mixed-race person with a light complexion. Aged 85, I don’t think she realised she was being offensive – but isn’t that the real problem here?

Sad news: Ski Sunday is no more. It was a staple of my childhood, something to look forward to on rainy Sunday afternoons. No doubt it will be replaced by something frightfully modern and woke. Another nail in the BBC’s coffin.