Will Swanton in the Oz this morning comments they either care enough to make placards and take proper action at the French Open or concede they don't really give a hoot before going about their regular business on the empire of dirt and terracotta clay at Roland Garros.

The French federation is baiting them and winning. After the players' consistent grizzling about receiving a lowly percentage of takings at the majors, the French Open has flipped the bird by giving them less, dropping their percentage of the gate from 15.5% to 14.9%.

I side with the players on all this ∼ they deserve their desired 22% of the kitty because it wouldn't be much of a French Open without them ∼ but their threats are sounding increasingly shallow.

They talk and talk but nobody walks. They're like your work colleagues forever whinging about their boss and pay and job. Mate, if you don't like it, quit! If you stay, stop complaining! Similarly, the players need to show they're fair dinkum or drop it.

The majors are banking on these athletes never skipping one of the tournaments that define their legacies. The message from the French Open is: You need us more than we need you. Unless the players get serious and take action, the fine print is right.

De Minaur was at pains during the Australian Open to explain that players are not demanding more money. They're seeking a higher percentage of spiralling profits. Because they're the ones generating windfall after windfall. If the majors make more dosh, so do the players. If the majors make less, so do the players. Seems impeccably reasonable to me. Are they responsible for 22% of a tournament’s success? Yes.

It’s lazy and easy to shout, the greedy bastards! The appeal and marketability of Sinner, Alcaraz, Sabalenka, Gauff and even de Minaur, before his season went belly-up, is undeniable. For example, this year’s final at Melbourne Park between Alcaraz and Novak Djokovic had 6.302 million TV viewers just in Australia. Ticket sales were through the roof. All thanks to the players.

Their request has merit. They get 22% of the takings at regular ATP and WTA events. It should be the same at the majors. But they need to strike or shoosh. Their words are becoming hollow. Perhaps they should consider the landmark Wimbledon of 1973, when 81 of the world’s best male players, including America’s defending champion Stan Smith and Australia’s John Newcombe and Ken Rosewall, boycotted the tournament in a watershed moment for the sport.

All three major U.S. stock indexes advanced and the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq eked out their latest in a series of all-time closing highs.

Semiconductors handily outshone other sectors, with the PHLX Semiconductor index jumping 2.6%, suggesting the AI wave is showing few signs of abating.

The semis and AI infrastructure trade has taken on a life entirely of its own, said Ross Mayfield, investment strategy analyst at Baird in Louisville, Kentucky. And there’s so much momentum and chasing to get in on some of these names that it seems almost somewhat divorced from any sort of like headline or announcement.

But some market watchers believe the rally is about to run out of momentum.

Investor Michael Burry warned on Monday that stocks are likely about to crash. In a post on his Substack, Burry, one of the biggest winners of the 2008 financial meltdown, said that the 2026 rally in tech stocks is about to end with a thud. The market has jumped the shark, he wrote.

First-quarter reporting period is nearing the finish line, with 440 of the companies in the S&P 500 having reported. Of those, 83% have topped earnings expectations, according to LSEG IBES.

As of Friday, analysts estimated first-quarter S&P 500 earnings growth, on aggregate, of 28.6% year-on-year. That’s nearly double the 14.4% first-quarter growth estimates as of April 1.

The strength of the rally largely is a function of earnings growth, which is superb, said Terry Sandven, chief equity strategist at U.S. Bank Wealth Management in Minneapolis.

Market watchers are looking ahead to next week, when the big-box retailers report, to get a sense of if there’s any change in consumer spending behavior following, you know, elevated prices at the gas pump.

But as earnings season nears the finish line, focus returns to macroeconomics and geopolitical developments.

President Donald Trump dismissed Iran’s response to a U.S. peace proposal, causing crude prices to spike and stoking concerns that a prolonged conflict will keep putting upward pressure on inflation, particularly at the gasoline pump, where consumers are feeling the pinch.

On that point, investors will pay close attention to economic indicators this week, particularly the Labor Department’s Consumer Price Index and the retail sales report from the Commerce Department, scanning the data for signs that the ongoing surge in energy prices is metastasizing into broader inflation or affecting consumer spending.

Producer prices and industrial output are also on this week’s economic calendar.

Later this week, President Trump is due to meet his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping in Beijing for talks covering a broad range of issues, including the Iran war, trade, nuclear weapons, Taiwan, artificial intelligence and possible extension of a critical rare-earth minerals deal.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 95.31 points, or 0.19%, to 49,704.47, the S&P 500 gained 13.91 points, or 0.19%, to 7,412.84 and the Nasdaq Composite gained 27.05 points, or 0.10%, to 26,274.13.

Among the 11 major sectors of the S&P 500, energy stocks boasted the largest percentage gains, while communication services were the biggest laggards.

Companies slated to report this week include tech networking giant Cisco and semiconductor equipment maker Applied Materials, while heavyweights Nvidia and Walmart are due to report later in the month.

On Monday, Intel rose 3.6% after surging 14% on Friday on a report of a preliminary chip-making agreement with Apple, while peer Qualcomm jumped 8.4% to a record high.

Media major Fox Corp rose 7.6% after beating third-quarter revenue estimates.

Among other movers, some airline stocks slipped as rising oil prices threatened to squeeze margins. Southwest Airlines, Delta Air Lines , Alaska Air and United Airlines fell between 2.9% and 4.4%.

Declining issues outnumbered advancers by a 1.08-to-1 ratio on the NYSE. There were 567 new highs and 144 new lows on the NYSE.

On the Nasdaq, 2,129 stocks rose and 2,704 fell as declining issues outnumbered advancers by a 1.27-to-1 ratio.

The S&P 500 posted 39 new 52-week highs and 42 new lows while the Nasdaq Composite recorded 157 new highs and 164 new lows.

Volume on U.S. exchanges was 21.42 billion shares, compared with the 17.99 billion average for the full session over the last 20 trading days.

It’s all very well welcoming people to Gadigal country in Sydney but how about we talk about the reality of life for so many Aboriginal people living outside our big cities.

Because it is the life lived in town camps ∼ best described as hellholes by Alice Springs local Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price ∼ that’s far more urgent today than who arrived 250 years ago.

We're not supposed to talk about Sharon Granites any more ∼ the sweet little five-year-old abducted last weekend ∼ because she’s dead. Her family want her described as Kumanjayi Little Baby for cultural reasons.

Modern day aboriginal culture

But it’s modern-day Aboriginal culture ∼ the unemployment, family dysfunction, and substance abuse that characterises remote Australia ∼ that’s led to her tragic, premature death.

The bed that this little girl was abducted from was a grotty mattress on a filthy floor, in a room full of empty Jim Beam bottles. Her father was in jail and there'd been a bit of a party before she disappeared. The DNA of two persons has been found on her underwear. Her accused killer was a frequent prison inmate too, not long released.

We talk a lot about reconciliation for the wrongs of the past. But what about rectifying the wrongs of the present? We argue incessantly about the failures of government to end Indigenous disadvantage but what about the failures of Aboriginal people too?

Town camps natorious

The town camps around Alice Springs have been notorious for years. Very few residents have real jobs, very few of the children go to school regularly, the police often feel powerless to enforce the law because they won't be supported by woke magistrates and weak governments and child protection officers feel they can't do what they otherwise would, for fear of creating another stolen generation.

Just because people happen to be Aboriginal doesn't mean that different standards apply.

The government says that this is not the time to talk about policy change. But if it’s not done now, everyone will move on until the next child dies.

Ask yourself this, would the outrage be different if this little girl and her alleged killer were from a nice suburb in the city? Where are the activists?

The defence is not merely intellectually dishonest; it reveals why it is only words is among the most dangerous sentences people permit themselves to believe.

As an Arabic noun, intifada does indeed possess an old, generic sense: a shaking, a dusting off. That is hardly unusual: holocaust once meant nothing more than a burnt offering; pogrom, in Russian, mere devastation; nakba, in Arabic, a misfortune ranging from mishap to calamity.

Words such as these begin life as ordinary common nouns. But each was claimed by a particular event: from 1945, the Holocaust; from 1987, the intifada. After that, the generic sense survives only in the dictionaries. It does not survive in the public mind.

Linguists call the process prototype entrenchment. The mind, hearing a word, reaches for the most vivid, most repeated, most emotionally charged instance and treats that as what the word stands for. Once the historical event has acquired that role, the bare definition recorded in the dictionary can no longer be peeled away from the moral, emotional and political charge the word has come to convey. To hear "Globalise the Holocaust" in 2026 and think proliferate the supply of burnt offerings is to misunderstand spoken English.

Struggles in the abstract

Exactly the same is true with intifada. Its prototype, in the global imagination, is not struggle in the abstract: it is two uprisings whose iconography, indelibly embedded by the violence that broke out in September 2000, includes suicide bombings of buses, restaurants and a Passover Seder. That is what the word now carries, not at its margins but as its core. The defender of Globalise the intifada is in effect asking language itself to forget history. But human communication does not work that way.

The point is more general: a slogan is not a sentence, and the test of whether one has understood it is not whether one can render it in a dictionary gloss. It compresses an entire moral world - heroes, villains, demands, threats — into a phrase made for chanting, and succeeds by being two things at once: precise enough to be grasped, ambiguous enough to be denied.

Paul Grice, one of the 20th century’s most important linguistic philosophers, gave the manoeuvre its name: implicature, the part of communication that travels not by what one says but by what one obviously means. To remark I am not going to call him corrupt is to inform the room that he is corrupt.

The structure is double-jointed: tested under cross-examination, the speaker retreats to what was literally uttered and accuses the critic of putting words in his mouth. The implicature does the work; the deniability provides the shelter. Globalise the intifada provides a textbook case.

Internationalising the struggle

A public forum, called Why it’s right to say: globalise the intifada, at a park in the Sydney suburb of Redfern, after City of Sydney lord mayor Clover Moore announced council had revoked the organisers' booking of City of Sydney-owned venue.

Pressed in a courtroom, the chant is glossed away as internationalise the struggle. Chanted from a stage on a Saturday afternoon, it means burnt buses, bombed cafes, murdered children.

The audiences who hear it ∼ on both sides ∼ hear that second meaning with perfect clarity. A slogan that everyone really took to mean only internationalise the struggle would hardly stir emotions; what does the stirring is precisely the violent imagery the speaker can also deny.

The genuinely dangerous moment, however, is not the slogan in isolation; it comes once the slogan begins to repeat.

Victor Klemperer, the Jewish philologist who retained his sanity during the Third Reich by recording its language in his diary, observed that the regime’s most powerful instrument was its vocabulary, not its decrees: a handful of words, drilled into daily life, did more to remake ordinary Germans than any speech. Fanatisch, once unambiguously pejorative, became under repetition a term of praise.

Slaughter of millions of Jews

Aktion became the bureaucratic veil behind which mass shootings disappeared — to incite an aktion was to incite the slaughter of millions of Jews, without actually saying so. Those shifts required no argument, only iteration.

Repetition is, in short, normalisation: hear a phrase once and it can shock; hear it for the 200th time and it has become part of the air we breathe. The extreme becomes ambient; the ambient, obvious; the obvious, embarrassing to question. Thus, each repetition of Globalise the intifada wears the menace in rather than out. The cost of saying it falls while the cost of objecting rises. What was once unsayable becomes ever easier to say.

Repetition does its most lethal work, however, not on the solitary newspaper reader but on bodies in a crowd. Slogans are designed not to be murmured but to be chanted rhythmically in unison. Once a phrase enters a crowd, it ceases to function as communication and begins to function as synchronisation. Voices align, breath aligns, sometimes feet align. Individuals shed the small frictions of doubt and hesitation that, in private, would have given them pause.

Sociologists call this collective effervescence and anyone who has been in a stadium at the right moment has felt it. What was an idea in a single skull becomes a felt fact across thousands. Disagreement is not refuted; in the passion of the moment it simply ceases to be available.

Pioneering scholars of mass behaviour

This is what the pioneering scholars of mass behaviour ∼ Gustave Le Bon, Gabriel Tarde, Emile Durkheim, Sigmund Freud, Elias Canetti ∼ meant by a crowd having a kind of mind. Not a mind in the literal sense but something far more dangerous: a temporarily uniform attention, a uniform emotion and ∼ crucially ∼ a uniform sense of who is us and who is them. Slogans are the instrument that does the tuning: and they are, as Canetti observed in the rise of Nazi antisemitism, the tool that drills in the hatred.

Put these mechanisms together and the result is not innocent speech but the manufacture of an atmosphere. A word historically captured by a violent prototype, dressed up in a deniable paraphrase and chanted by bodies whose private hesitations have been switched off — that is the recipe by which a society talks itself into permission.

It tells one group who it is by telling it who its mortal enemy is. And it tells the other ∼ nowadays the Zios ∼ that they are no longer part of the moral community. It hardens the shouters against dialogue and compromise. And it thickens the air with the sense that violence, when it comes, will have been only the natural conclusion of what everyone already knew.

Slogans are innocent?

The historical record is unambiguous: where crowds are taught to chant a word that already names a massacre, the distance between word and violence, speech and act, never grows: it shortens.

The claim that slogans are innocent has always been a flattering one because it relieves us of the duty to attend to what is being said. It allows us to continue repeating comforting platitudes about freedom of expression. But words are not inert, and chanted words least of all.

Whatever else Globalise the intifada may mean in the dictionary, what it means in the street is what we must be willing to hear. Pretending otherwise is not tolerance. It is how societies learn, slowly and without noticing, to live with the unforgivable.