Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
Proposed legislation would also give government power to unmask identities of anonymous accounts
Australian internet service providers, social media companies and other online platforms will need to remove severely harmful, abusive or bullying content within 24 hours or risk being blocked and fined $555,000 under the federal government’s proposed online safety legislation.
Currently, takedown notices for image-based abuse, cyber-abuse, cyberbullying, and seriously harmful online content needs to be actioned within 48 hours.
Australian Competition and Consumer Commission concerned tech giant could harm competitors in wake of deal
Google faces a fine of up to $400m if it takes over Fitbit before the Australian competition regulator completes an investigation into the transaction.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) on Tuesday rejected an offer from Google to enter into a court-enforceable undertaking limiting the way it would use data gleaned from the wrist-worn fitness tracking devices.
Police have charged four men with unlawfully lighting fires on K’gari/Fraser Island that started the blazes which scorched more than half of the World heritage-listed tourism drawcard.
Queensland Police and and Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service carried out a joint investigation and detectives yesterday charged the four men in their 20s who are all from the Warwick area, 130 kilometres southeast of Brisbane.
Berejiklian says she is frustrated with other premiers who are closing borders to the whole of NSW.
“There are parts of New South Wales completely unaffected by this current outbreak and yet everybody in New South Wales is suffering because other state leaders made decisions,” she says.
Tesco has introduced buying limits on items including toilet roll, eggs, rice, soap and handwash. Customers at the supermarket are now limited to one item per person of toilet roll, and up to three products of eggs, rice, soap and handwash.
It is understood the extra limits are pre-emptive measures to help smooth demand in the coming weeks, rather than a reaction to shortages or a change in buying behaviour. They are on top of a three-item limit on essential items such as flour, dried pasta and anti-bacterial wipes which has been in place for several months.
A hard lockdown across Sydney for the next three days is needed to reduce the risk of Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve becoming super spreader events, some health experts have warned.
The dual celebrations could lead to thousands of new cases in the first weeks of 2021 without drastic action, warned Prof Raina MacIntyre, the head of the biosecurity program at the University of New South Wales’ Kirby Institute.
It was all over, though, once the Mountain Goats got involved. Their popular 2011 track This Year was sitting at No 3 until the band discovered it and tweeted about this fact with a shameless plea for votes.
On 15 March 2019 a man entered the Al Noor mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand and shot Temel Atacocugu nine times. That day 51 people were killed, but Temel survived.
Reporter Charlotte Graham-McLay follows Temel’s journey – through surgeries, the terrorist’s sentencing and a royal commission – as he tries to recover and rebuild his life.
Just one week ago, things were looking rosy. There were no known active locally acquired coronavirus cases in Australia. State borders were mostly open. Christmas hams had been ordered. While many other countries were facing extended lockdowns, the festive season in Australia was in full swing.
The Italian health ministry is reporting that they have found a patient infected with the same mutated strain of coronavirus as the UK.
The infected patient returned to Italy from the UK with his partner in the past few days and landed in Rome’s Fiumicino airport. They’re now in isolation, the ministry said.
El Salvador has banned travellers who have been to the UK or South Africa in the last 30 days.
President Nayib Bukele announced the new decision on Twitter after linking a Reuters story on European countries closing their borders to UK passengers.
A partir de ahora, queda prohibido el ingreso a nuestro país, de cualquier persona que su itinerario de vuelo haya incluido el Reino Unido o Sudáfrica o que haya estado en alguno de esos dos países en los últimos 30 días.
Police say another daughter called for help after seeing her father and sister in trouble
A man and his daughter have drowned in the Murrumbidgee River in the ACT.
Police were called to a swimming hole south of Canberra, the Tharwa Sandwash, about 2.20pm on Saturday after receiving reports that people were in difficulty.
The New South Wales premier, Gladys Berejiklian, has warned residents of greater Sydney to prepare for an increase in restrictions if the outbreak of Covid-19 expands beyond the northern beaches.
Meanwhile travellers coming from NSW to Queensland will require a border pass declaration from 1am on Sunday and Western Australia announced it was reinstating its hard border with NSW.
The discovery that bilbies, bandicoots, Tasmanian devils and echidnas emit bio-fluorescence under UV light has sparked the burning question. Why?
Dr Kenny Travouillon turned off the lights and headed straight for the shelf holding the stuffed platypus, armed with an ultraviolet torch to test something out. Would the monotreme glow?
“All the platypuses were glowing,” says Travouillon, the mammals curator at the Western Australian Museum in Perth. “We went through with other mammals and we found they were glowing too.”
Christmas travel plans up in the air after Sydney cluster grows to 28 and Qld, WA, Victoria and Tasmania announce new border restrictions and quarantine measures
When asked why he isn’t implementing a hard border with NSW, Mcgown says it’s because the outbreak is not as “spread out” as the Adelaide outbreak, when the state did implement a hard border.
“It’s based upon the number of cases and the spread of the cases. So if the cases are out from their existing location to other parts of Sydney or New South Wales, if the numbers grow as they have, or even more, then there may well be a requirement to go to a harder border arrangement.”
WA health minister Roger Cook has announced one additional case in the state overnight, which takes total cases to 844.
In relation to the clinics, he says all travellers who have arrived in WA from NSW between 11 and 17 December are required to immediately self-quarantine and be tested at a Covid clinic. They will have to remain in quarantine until they receive a negative result.
A flatback sea turtle has been filmed defending itself from a tiger shark attack off the Western Australia coast. A team of researchers at Murdoch University’s Harry Butler Institute and Western Australia’s Department of Biodiversity, Conservation & Attractions captured the vision after mounting a camera on the turtle's shell during a project at Roebuck Bay. Despite the mismatch in size, the turtle uses aggressive biting lunges at the shark before making a hasty escape to safety
Poland will enter a national quarantine from 28 December to 17 January, during which all hotels, ski slopes and shopping malls will close, the health minister, Adam Niedzielski, said on Thursday.
“I call on every Pole to be responsible for themselves and their loved ones. But I know that calls won’t help,” Niedzielski told a news conference.
One of Ukraine’s best known veteran politicians, Gennady Kernes, died in Germany early on Thursday from Covid-19 complications, local authorities and members of his family said.
Mayor of the largest eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, Kernes, 61, went into politics after making his fortune in the post-communist 1990s.
State breaks 12-day streak with no local transmission as Sydney airport driver test positive and two mystery cases emerge in the northern beaches. Follow latest updates
Late morning the treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, will release the mid-year economic and fiscal update which is expected to show that the budget deficit will be less than $200bn due to a $11bn saving on jobkeeper and rising iron ore prices boosting revenue.
Asked about the $11bn jobkeeper saving, the finance minister Simon Birmingham told Channel Nine:”Look, it is really encouraging to see the strength of the recovery in the Australian economy. Now, there is still a long way to go but we’ve seen more than 650,000 jobs created across Australia in recent months. More Australians back in work, fewer Australians on JobKeeper - this is a trend that we want to see continue but we know that there are always threats present.
The Victorian Ombudsman has tabled an investigation into the detention and treatment of public housing residents at the onset of the second wave in the state.
Ombudsman's Investigation into the detention and treatment of public housing residents arising from a COVID-19 'hard lockdown' in July 2020 tabled today, a non-sitting day https://t.co/cXTFf4wPIy#springst
A severe weather warning has been issued for Wagga and much of the Riverina for flash flooding this afternoon.
Severe thunderstorms have been forecast for the entire region, all the way from Hay in the west, right across to the east coast, and from the Queensland border down to Tumbarumba.
⚡SEVERE THUNDERSTORM WARNING⚡ for HEAVY RAINFALL. Warning current for much of central and eastern NSW and the ACT. 2hr Obs: 92mm @ Lismore. 30min Obs: 26mm @ Glen Alice, 25mm at Mt.Werong & 22mm @ Lake Burley Griffin. ⚠️Warnings: https://t.co/30woSZ6O2x#ifitsfloodedforgetitpic.twitter.com/L8OXMiSlAz
Victoria police commissioner Shane Patton has sought to differentiate between the police approach during the Black Lives Matter protest in Melbourne in early June and anti-lockdown protests that were broken up during the second wave, with many more fined.
Patton told a Victorian parliament Covid-19 committee on Wednesday that at the time of the BLM protest, the spread of Covid was not as big as it was later on in the second wave, and there weren’t the severe restrictions at the time that were seen later – in June, groups of up to 20 people could assemble.
We eventually made a decision to reluctantly allow that Black Lives Matter to go ahead, because of the emotion that was in the community, because of the emotion that was being displayed across the world.
Tourist operators will be able to cater for more than just weekend visitors, and airlines have shown plenty of enthusiasm
New Zealand tourism businesses will be gratefully awaiting the arrival of Australian travellers who previously made up 40% of international arrivals and spent $2.7bn during their stay.
Data from Tourism New Zealand also shows that 89% of Aussie visitors stay a minimum of four days, and this will be crucial for tourism operators who have been doing their best to survive on domestic travellers only. Although the “team of 5 million” Kiwis has made a concerted effort to support the industry, domestic travel is heavily skewed toward weekends and public holidays. Operators will be excited at the prospect of having an additional supply of midweek customers.