Background Briefing: December 15, 2025
The Hanukkah Terror Attack in Australia
We begin with Sunday’s massacre on Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia on the first night of Hanukkah in which 16 were killed including one of the two terrorists and dozens were wounded. Joining us from Sydney to discuss the alarm and grief in Australia’s Jewish community and reports that Australia’s domestic intelligence service had investigated the surviving terrorist in 2019 for his ties to the Islamic State is Jordan Baker, Chief Reporter of The Sydney Morning Herald. She was previously the Herald’s Education Editor and her latest article at The Sydney Morning Herald we discuss is “It was pure chaos’: When terror spilled blood at Bondi Beach.”
Trump’s Disgusting Reaction to the Murders of Rob Reiner and His Wife
Then we examine Trump’s disgusting reaction to the murder of Rob Reiner and his wife and speak with a friend of theirs Jonathan Alter, an analyst and contributing correspondent for NBC News and MS.Now. He is a former senior editor and columnist for Newsweek, where he worked for twenty-eight years. He is the author of The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope, a New York Times bestseller, and His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, A Life. His latest book is American Reckoning: Inside Trump’s Trial—and My Own and he runs the Substack newsletter Old Goats where his latest article we discuss is “Trump’s Secret Pardon-for-Profit Racket.”
Today’s Conviction of the Hong Kong Freedom Activist Jimmy Lai
Then finally we speak with Victoria Hui, a professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame where her research examines the dynamics of international politics and state-society relations in historical China and historical Europe. She is the author of War and State Formation in Ancient China and Early Modern Europe, has worked in the democracy movement in Hong Kong and now serves on the Academic Advisors Committee of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict. We discuss today’s conviction of the freedom activist Jimmy Lai under Hong Kong’s Beijing-imposed National Security Law.