Hagipantelis and former Wests Tigers NRL club chief executive Justin Pascoe have a 25% stake in Maverick Sports Partners, which bought the Jets in June 2024.

In less than two years, the Jets have gone from the verge of collapse to winning the Australia Cup, the Premiers' Plate and earning a place in the Asian Championship Elite division, where they will compete against some of the richest clubs in world football.

A chance at a third trophy, the A-League championship, awaits.

The Jets will take on Sydney FC in the first leg of the semi-final series at Allianz Stadium on Saturday night.

The second leg is being played at McDonald Jones Stadium on May 16.

Victory will secure the Jets a home grand final.

Hagipantelis and Pascoe are non-management owners and have been busy expanding their sports ownership with the acquisition of Super Netball franchise Sunshine Coast Lightning and Canadian Elite Basketball League club the Ottawa Blackjacks.

He joined other consortium partners at the Jets awards night last Friday.

Asked if he envisaged such a quick turnaround with the Jets, Hagipantelis said: “Not at all. I don't think anyone could.

“We saw it as a fabulous opportunity. I'm very familiar with the area, of course. We have sponsored the Newcastle Knights for many years. I do a lot of work up in the Newcastle Hunter region. They're very parochial up here.

“The club had its challenges in the past.

“We knew if we could turn around this club, it would garner enormous support.

“What [coach] Mark Milligan has done with them this year has been incredible.

“And as I say, aided and abetted by a really good executive team, led by Taine Drinkwater, and an ownership group that’s all working towards one goal.

“I love the vibe in the club. It’s a really youthful group. There is a new feeling within the club itself.

Everyone’s pulling in the same direction, which is very important for success in any sporting franchise.

Washington said on Tuesday its ceasefire with Iran was intact, allaying worries that attempts by both sides to assert control over the Strait of Hormuz would escalate hostilities.

Investors focused on AI-related companies, and chip designer rallied 4% ahead of its quarterly report after the bell, with analysts expecting a 33% surge in revenue.

Intel surged 13% after Bloomberg News reported that Apple about enlisting the company’s chipmaking services to produce the main processors for its devices.

The PHLX chip index jumped 4.2% to a record high, and the index is now up 55% in 2026.

S&P 500 companies are on track to post aggregate earnings growth of 28% year-over-year for the first quarter, the strongest quarterly profit growth since 2021, according to Tajinder Dhillon, head of earnings research at LSEG.

Wall Street’s AI heavyweights account for much of that optimism.

Markets are following fundamentals. Earnings are coming in pretty strong, and the expectation is that will carry forward into the rest of the year, said Tom Hainlin, an investment strategist at U.S. Bank Wealth Management in Minneapolis.

Business spending remains strong, whether it’s on AI or other productivity tools, and consumers continue to spend, Hainlin said.

The S&P 500 climbed 0.81% to end the session at 7,259.22 points.

The Nasdaq gained 1.03% to 25,326.13 points, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 0.73% to 49,298.25 points.

All 11 S&P 500 sector indexes rose, led by materials, up 1.67%, followed by a 1.63% gain in information technology.

Brent crude futures fell but still traded at $110 a barrel.

Data on Tuesday showed U.S. job openings dropped to 6.866 million in March, slightly above the 6.835 million estimate. That reinforced the view that labor market resilience could give the central bank room to keep interest rates higher for longer.

The Institute for Supply Management’s Non-Manufacturing Purchasing Managers' Index for April came in at 53.6, narrowly missing the estimate of 53.7, according to economists polled by Reuters.

Grain trader Archer-Daniels-Midland rose 3.8% after reporting better-than-expected first-quarter profit on higher margins.

DuPont rallied 8.4% after the industrial materials maker lifted its annual profit forecast.

Shares of Pinterest soared 6.9% after the image-sharing platform forecast second-quarter revenue above analysts' estimates.

Advancing issues outnumbered falling ones within the S&P 500 by a 1.7-to-one ratio.

The S&P 500 posted 43 new highs and 23 new lows; the Nasdaq recorded 160 new highs and 79 new lows.

Volume on U.S. exchanges was relatively light, with 16.1 billion shares traded, compared to an average of 17.7 billion shares over the previous 20 sessions. ↑

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?

Formally, the resolution condemns the African slave trade as a whole. Substantively, every concrete reference targets the transatlantic trade, fixating on a racialised capitalist system and its purported Western antecedents. The cumulative effect is unmistakeable: to brand the trade a distinctively Western crime.

To sustain that impression, the resolution parades a sequence of decrees, starting with the papal bulls of 1452 and 1455, which it casts as the founding charters of the enslavement and structural racism that still unjustly impoverishes Africa, thereby grounding a claim to substantial reparations.

Text turns conspicuously evasive

Yet, having been forensically specific about blame, the text turns conspicuously evasive when it confronts the forces that brought the Atlantic trade to an end. The Enlightenment, the abolitionist movements, and the Western legal and political campaigns that culminated in the trade’s eventual demise are, it appears, unmentionable.

While the offending decrees are named, dated and indicted, the tide of opposition to slavery, which gathered momentum in the 17th century, is dismissed as certain legal challenges and judicial developments in the 18th century that questioned the legality and morality of chattel enslavement.

That descent into vagueness reflects a deliberate strategy: to particularise the guilt while diluting the credit. Merely cataloguing the misrepresentations, confusions and factual errors this strategy produces would require far more space than is available here. What is especially striking, however, are the omissions.

Intellectually dishonest

It is, for example, intellectually dishonest to invoke the papal bulls of 1452 and 1455 while ignoring Pope Paul III’s bull of 1537, which denounced as an invention of the devil the idea that native peoples should be treated as dumb brutes created for our service, and affirmed that they may and should, freely and legitimately, enjoy their liberty.

Paul III’s exhortations had limited immediate effect; so too did Cartwright’s Case (1569), which declared that England’s air was too pure for slaves to dwell in. What matters is what they reveal: an unceasing moral interrogation of slavery within the West itself — an interrogation that gave abolitionism the bedrock on which to build.

Intellectually dishonest

Here, too, the resolution’s selectivity is purposeful. It allows it to avoid an obvious and crucial comparator: the long history of slavery under Islamic rule, which it ignores altogether. From the Arab conquests to the early 20th century, some 14 million black slaves were transported into the lands of Islam via the trans-Saharan, Red Sea and Indian Ocean routes, with nearly a million more carried beyond the East African coast. Add to these more than a million white slaves, and the total comfortably exceeds the 10 million to 12 million who landed in the Americas.

Yet the numbers are not what is most significant. The salient fact is the absence of any sustained doctrinal or institutional challenge to the morality and legality of the slave trade within the Islamic world — even where it starkly contradicted the Koranic prohibition on enslaving Muslims. As Bruce Hall shows in his study of Saharan and Sahelian slavery, by the 19th century ∼ when the West was vigorously suppressing chattel slavery ∼ the operative presumption among Maliki jurists was that black Africans, routinely described as savages, were enslavable by default, whatever their faith.

Muslims still slaved away

There were individuals who objected strenuously to chattel slavery, such as Syrian reformer Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi (1855-1902); but no Muslim opponent of slavery ever forged those concerns into a mass movement. Bernard Lewis’s verdict that even the most radical Muslim modernists fell well short of matching the fervour and effectiveness of Western abolitionists retains all its force.

It is therefore unsurprising that Islam’s leading theologians, far from championing abolition, actively resisted it — beginning with the infamous 1855 fatwa, issued with the full authority of Mecca’s Shaykh Jamal, which declared any prohibition of the slave trade contrary to the holy law of Islam and any official who attempted to enforce it lawful to kill.

Nor is it surprising that Saudi Arabia and Yemen abolished slavery only in 1962, the United Arab Emirates in 1964, Oman in 1970, and Mauritania ∼ after repeated ineffectual measures ∼ in 2007. Moreover, even where slavery was formally abolished, forms of vassalage have remained firmly in place: of the 10 countries with the highest incidence of modern slavery, eight are majority-Muslim.

Suffering olympics

But the resolution does not merely distort history by pretending Islamic slavery didn't exist. It declares the slave trade the greatest crime against humanity ever committed. Although not explicitly stated, a central purpose of this travesty ∼ which converts the horrors of the past into a suffering Olympics ∼ is again transparent: to relativise the Holocaust.

It is frankly obscene to degrade moral evaluation into a body count, with medals of ignominy awarded by a show of hands. Yet even in so repulsive a spectacle, realities should have been allowed to intrude. Those realities are well known. Death rates in the Holocaust ∼ whose unrelenting aim was the complete extermination of Jews ∼ were close to or above 90%. So complete was the indifference to fatalities that the German railways were paid whether the Jews being shipped by them lived or died during their transport — and the few who survived the journeys were killed, on average, within days of arrival.

In contrast, as investor Thomas Starke wrote to Captain James Westmore in 1700, the whole benefit of the voyage lyes in your care of preserving negroes' lives. As a result, strenuous efforts were made to ensure slaves remained alive and saleable, including by granting handsome bonuses to captains for high survival rates and imposing stiff penalties for excess mortality.

Black deaths declined dramatically

Although those efforts hardly eliminated the trade’s horrors, they did mean that by the late 18th century, death rates for black slaves on the middle passage had declined dramatically, to the point where they were only marginally greater than those for crews. To pretend otherwise is to erase the distinction between exploitation and extermination: for there was nothing in the slave trade even remotely comparable to the systematic mass murder at the heart of the Holocaust.

But to acknowledge those facts ∼ which flatly contradict the assault on the standing of the Holocaust ∼ might have eroded the overwhelming support the resolution secured. And the composition of that support says everything one needs to know about the resolution.

Thus, every one of the 20 countries that have the highest incidence of modern slavery and forced labour cynically voted in its favour; so did all the authoritarian states that participated in the vote, with the exception of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan; and, again with the exception of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, it received the active backing of every Muslim-majority country.

Yet that is not the real tragedy. Rather, it is that only three Western countries ∼ the US, Israel and Argentina ∼ had the decency to vote against the falsification of history, instead of abstaining, as Australia and the European Union did. Those three were willing to oppose this charade. Why weren't we?