Man charged with DV murder after allegedly shooting Gold Coast mother who could ‘light up any room’

Mallorie Jane Roberts, 23, found with gunshot wounds on Sunday evening with her partner arrested at the home

A woman who died from gunshot wounds in an alleged domestic violence murder was “a beautiful young mother” who leaves behind a two-year-old son.

Emergency services were called to a home on Loder Street in the Gold Coast suburb of Biggera Waters, in Queensland, at about 8pm on Sunday.

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Pauline Hanson’s One Nation withdrew more than $800,000 of election spending claims after AEC inquiries

The Australian Electoral Commission is examining if party breached laws in its $6m public funding claim after the last election, documents show

The Australian Electoral Commission questioned Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party over more than $800,000 of claimed electoral expenditure for the last election, Guardian Australia can reveal.

Documents obtained under freedom of information laws show that the inquiries prompted the party to withdraw more than 140 items as it sought to provide additional information to justify almost 15% of the party’s $6.01m public funding claim.

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Parliament has been getting frosty as winter closes in – but Labor may make one more gamble before the break

As Labor pushes on with reforms, the Coalition must decide whether to join in the parliamentary deal-making

It’s the last week of parliament before the winter break, and not a minute too soon; tensions have been running a little high lately.

The lower house speaker, Milton Dick, has been yeeting MPs mere moments into question time and accused Angus Taylor of “demeaning” the parliament by calling Anthony Albanese a liar; Andrew Hastie claimed One Nation “has declared war on me, so they shall have war”; Labor has been goading the Coalition and its media “cheer squad” for opposing the budget; the Greens hate Labor’s NDIS bill; and people in the Coalition seem to be mad at everyone, including themselves.

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‘Tech firms are losing the public’: social media age bans near tipping point

UK is latest country to set minimum age for social media access but big tech is fighting back globally against curbs

Arturo Béjar, a former employee turned whistleblower at Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, has talked to parents around the world. He says they share the same perspective: they dread the day their children are old enough to go online.

Governments appear to be listening too. This month the UK became the latest country to state that it would set a minimum age of 16 for accessing major social media platforms. Social media bans are becoming a legislative trend after the precedent set by Australia last year, when it imposed an age limit on platforms including Meta’s Instagram and Facebook, Google’s YouTube, Elon Musk’s X, TikTok and Snapchat.

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Australia news live: auction clearance rates continue to hover under 50% as Chalmers defends tax reform plan

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Big tech not cooperating ‘as much as we’d like them to’: Watt

Federal cabinet minister Murray Watt, says the government knows it’s needed to take more action to ensure social media giants are complying with a ban for under 16s that came into effect in December.

These laws were brand new, never developed anywhere in the world. And what we’ve learned is that the powers that the safety commissioner has do need to be beefed up, also to give her powers across things like age assurance tools. So things that sit outside the social media platforms themselves, but compelling them to provide information so that she can do her job even better.

The pace of change is accelerating, the global and generational pressures are intensifying, and people have got legitimate concerns about where they fit in that, and then we’ve got the anger industry, and parties of the populist right trying to make that worse rather than trying to make that better.

It is a difficult time around the world to be an incumbent government, from our point of view. We are using the power of incumbency to take real action, to deliver cost-of-living help, to deliver real change. The best antidote to anger is action … The Albanese Labour government has chosen to address those concerns rather than dismiss them.

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Australia to double penalty for social media ban breaches to $99m as tech giants accused of ‘not doing enough’

Prime minister Anthony Albanese says too many children still on platforms but he is ‘heartened’ by world-leading law

The federal government will double the penalty for breaches of Australia’s youth social media ban to $99m, arguing tech companies are “not doing enough” to keep children off harmful social media sites.

And the eSafety commissioner, now investigating potential breaches of the law by Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube, will have its information-gathering powers strengthened under proposed further reforms.

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Hikers lost in Kosciuszko national park rescued within five hours by AI drone

Fire and Rescue NSW uses thermal imaging and a mobile phone red light to quickly locate men who veered off walking track near Jindabyne

Two hikers who veered off a walking track in Kosciuszko national park have been found within five hours using a drone powered by artificial intelligence, a first-of-its-kind mission, Fire and Rescue NSW (FRNSW) has said.

The two men, aged in their 20s, were reported missing at 7pm on Tuesday evening after they failed to return to a rendezvous point on time.

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Here we Joh again? The spectre of Bjelke-Petersen still looms large over Queensland

The LNP’s unapologetic moves on crime, transgender healthcare and police-led suppression of protests are a throwback to days many thought had come and gone

A sign stopped Aunty Sandra King in her tracks. The elder of the Yagara, Quandamooka and Bundjalung people, now in her 70s, spoke at a protest last month against plans to build an Olympic stadium in the heart of Brisbane’s Victoria Park.

In the crowd a man held aloft a homemade placard with the words “I Preferred Joh”.

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Park to protect 12,000 koalas to go ahead via contentious carbon credit deal by Albanese government

Minns government waited on federal approval of carbon credit scheme before proceeding with long-awaited great koala national park

A long-promised New South Wales great koala national park is set to go ahead after the Albanese government greenlit the state to receive hundreds of millions of dollars for protecting native forests previously earmarked for logging.

The assistant climate change minister, Josh Wilson, said the government had approved a regulatory change that allowed state governments to earn carbon credits by storing carbon dioxide in native forests on public land.

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Australian musicians sound warning note after Nick Cave, Kylie and many more slurped into AI training tool

‘It’s all just rendered useless’, Something For Kate’s Paul Dempsey says as AI scrapes millions of songs to learn how to make music

Paul Dempsey and Bernard Fanning are among big-name Australian musicians upset that their original songs have been found in datasets used to train artificial intelligence.

A dataset search tool recently created by US publication The Atlantic reveals millions of creative works have been scraped from the internet to train the disruptive technology.

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‘No offence detected’: Victoria police close investigation into Moira Deeming allegation of assault by Matthew Guy

Guy accuses Deeming of making ‘ridiculous and unsubstantiated’ claims as state Liberal party grapples with fallout

Police have concluded their investigation into Victorian Liberal MP Moira Deeming’s allegation that her colleague Matthew Guy assaulted her, making the finding “no offence detected”.

Deeming had reported to police on 16 June that Guy, the opposition’s public transport spokesperson, had assaulted her at a Macedonian community event in Sunshine on 23 May.

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Who is Tommy Robinson? The Karl Stefanovic guest who has cost Australia’s famed TV host his job

Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, is an anti-Islamic, far-right political activist well known in the UK and Europe

The man who calls himself Tommy Robinson has roared into prominence in Australia after the morning TV mainstay Karl Stefanovic posted an interview with Robinson for his podcast.

The fallout was swift. Nine Entertainment, Australia’s largest locally owned media empire, has severed ties with Stefanovic, and he will not appear on a radio show with Eddie McGuire on Friday.

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Karl Stefanovic to leave Nine immediately after Today host’s podcast controversy

Network says it was ‘no longer possible’ for Stefanovic to host Today, days after he interviewed far-right activist Tommy Robinson on independent podcast

Karl Stefanovic is leaving Nine immediately, the network said in a statement on Friday.

It was presented as a joint decision, however it follows days of controversy after the highly paid Today presenter used his independent podcast to interview British far-right activist Tommy Robinson.

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Victorian Liberal MP Matthew Guy denies accusation he assaulted Moira Deeming in incident allegedly captured by CCTV

Police confirm they are investigating as sources close to Guy say he vehemently denies the allegations and is considering legal action

The Victorian Liberal party is in turmoil just five months out from the state election after MP Moira Deeming accused colleague Matthew Guy of assaulting her at a community event.

Sources close to Guy, the opposition’s public transport spokesperson, said he vehemently denies the allegation, which is being investigated by police, and is considering a defamation legal action against Deeming.

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Karl Stefanovic won’t appear on Friday radio show with Eddie McGuire amid Tommy Robinson interview fallout

Nine Entertainment is expected to sever ties with the Today show host but is yet to make details of the separation public

Karl Stefanovic will not appear on his scheduled Friday afternoon radio show with Eddie McGuire after widespread criticism of his podcast interview with UK far-right activist Tommy Robinson.

Stefanovic only recently signed the deal with ARN Media to co-host The Long Weekend nationally on Gold FM, but the threat of an advertising boycott has led to the contract being reviewed, Guardian Australia understands.

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The pianist from the audience at La La Land in Concert was a global feelgood story – but all was not what it seemed

Two orchestra members from the Sydney performance allege tensions behind the scenes were the cause of pianist failing to appear after intermission

When an audience member stepped in for a pianist at a Sydney performance of La La Land in Concert last month it made global headlines.

During the intermission of the concert at Darling Harbour Theatre on 30 May, the two-time Oscar-winning composer and conductor Justin Hurwitz appealed to the 2,000-strong crowd for an “amazing sight-reader”, saying one of his two keyboardists had fallen ill.

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Critic of Labor’s tax changes deletes anti-immigration AI video reposted from rightwing nationalist account

Fund manager Geoff Wilson says he did not watch full video and deleted it after ‘inappropriate associations were identified’

The fund manager Geoff Wilson, a prominent public critic of the government’s tax changes, has deleted an inflammatory AI-generated video he reposted from a rightwing nationalist account portraying Anthony Albanese and Jim Chalmers taking money from white Australians and giving it to recently arrived migrants wearing Islamic face coverings.

Wilson said he had not watched the full video before sharing it or examined other accounts, some of whose content he reposted on Wednesday morning – which included content relating to the QAnon conspiracy theory – and deleted his posts after being contacted by Guardian Australia.

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Australian citizen working as spy for Iran ‘orchestrated’ Bondi firebombing, Asio boss says

Mike Burgess’s annual threat assessment warns social media is ‘amplifying’ an erosion of trust in institutions, promoting discord and heightening polarisation

An Australian citizen working as a senior intelligence officer for Iran “orchestrated” a firebombing in Bondi, the country’s top spy has revealed, while a former Australian resident in Iraq directed the attack on a Melbourne synagogue.

The homegrown ties to Australia’s “summer of antisemitism” are contained in a wide-ranging speech given by Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation’s (Asio) director general, Mike Burgess, on Wednesday night, in which he said the “hatred of Jews is one thing virtually all the violent extremist cohorts have in common”.

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Western Australian police to review response to Virginia Giuffre domestic violence dispute

Police will investigate how they interacted with Giuffre, one of Jeffrey Epstein’s most prominent victims, after her family requested the review

Police in Western Australia have agreed to review how they interacted with Virginia Giuffre, one of the most prominent victims of the disgraced US financier Jeffrey Epstein, in the lead-up to her death a year ago by suicide.

Giuffre’s brother and sister-in-law, Sky and Amanda Roberts, told ABC radio on Wednesday morning that they had written to both the state coroner and the police requesting an investigation into how police handled a domestic violence dispute she was involved in before she took her life on her WA farm last April at age 41.

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