Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
Data released this week proves what the arts and recreation industry already knows: we are by far the industry hardest hit by Covid-19’s economic destruction.
Qantas is moving to recruit cabin staff from its New Zealand subsidiary to operate scheduled flights to rescue Australians trapped overseas, after it failed to get sufficient volunteers from its Australian cabin staff to operate planned flights.
Amid news that 50 Qantas and Jetstar staff have contracted coronavirus there has been growing anxiety among Qantas staff about plans to resume flights to Los Angeles, London, Auckland and Hong Kong later this week.
Vatican praises Australian cardinal for having ‘waited for the truth to be ascertained’
Pope Francis has recalled the “persecution that Jesus suffered” and has prayed for those who suffer “unjust sentences” hours after Australia’s highest court acquitted cardinal George Pell of child sexual abuse.
The court in Canberra quashed convictions that Pell sexually assaulted two choirboys in the 1990s, allowing the 78-year-old former Vatican economy minister to walk free from jail, ending the most high-profile case of alleged historical sex abuse to rock the Roman Catholic church.
Australian prime minister Scott Morrison speaks to the media in Canberra about how Australia is tracking in dealing with the spread of the coronavirus. "We are making significant progress," Morrison said before urging continued vigilance over the upcoming Easter holiday. "We must keep the tension in the cord".
Pell freed immediately after the high court’s decision that his appeal should be upheld, as there was ‘a significant possibility that an innocent person has been convicted’
Cardinal George Pell, the former financial controller of the Vatican and the most senior Catholic in the world to have been found guilty of historical child sexual abuse, has been freed from prison and had his convictions overturned following a two-year legal battle.
The bench of the high court in Brisbane, Australia, on Tuesday granted leave for Pell to appeal, ordering his immediate release and quashing the conviction.
Cardinal Pell’s child sexual assault conviction was upheld in the Victorian court of appeal. Now the high court will rule on whether he will stay in jail or walk free. Follow live updates
Long lines have formed outside supermarkets after Coles, Woolworths and IGA began limiting the number of customers inside stores in a bid to allow physical distancing and keep flattening the curve of Covid-19 infections during the Easter rush.
The Thursday before Easter is traditionally one of the busiest days for supermarkets, as people stock up for the weekend.
Australian high court’s decision is Pell’s last chance to overturn conviction for historical child sexual abuse
On Tuesday, almost two years after being committed to stand trial on multiple charges of historical child sexual abuse, the case against the former financial controller of the Vatican, Cardinal George Pell, will likely end with him either walking free or remaining in jail to serve the rest of his sentence.
After failing to appeal to Victoria’s appellate court in August, Pell’s legal team took his case to the high court, the final avenue in his bid for freedom. Across two days in March, the full bench of seven justices heard Pell’s barrister Bret Walker SC argue that Victoria’s appellate judges, who dismissed Pell’s first appeal in 2019 by a majority of two-to-one, may have been unduly influenced by the complainant’s testimony by watching a recorded video of it rather than just reading the transcript of his evidence.
The Australian death toll from Covid-19 related illnesses stands at 34, as of 4 April. This story will be updated as further deaths are confirmed and Australia’s coronavirus victims are identified.
Monitoring work suspended due to restrictions on travel and physical contact, in a blow for research into threatened species
Scientists are being forced to shut down or scale back fieldwork to assess the impact of last summer’s devastating bushfires on threatened species amid the coronavirus crisis, prompting concerns it could affect wildlife recovery.
Several universities have shut down fieldwork to comply with restrictions on travel and physical contact and government agencies working on the recovery have had to scale back some of their operations.
The New South Wales health minister, Brad Hazzard, has defended the role of health experts who allowed 2,700 passengers to disembark the Ruby Princess cruise ship and make their own way home, following reports that authorities knew about the widespread respiratory sickness on board.
NSW Health has confirmed it had been aware of 104 people with “acute respiratory infections” on the Ruby Princess. Leaked emails show the ship’s doctor told authorities on 18 March that people who had presented at the onboard medical clinic with flu-like symptoms had tested negative for influenza.
Victoria and Queensland register deaths as Western Australia flags border closure and federal government acts on childcare and industrial relations concerns. Follow live updates
The PM stresses that the “health advice we have is that there is no health reasons why children can’t go to school”.
Asked if taxes will increase to pay for its massive stimulus funding, Morrison does not address this directly.
Obviously there will be a heightened debt burden as a result of decisions we have had to take. They have been necessary decisions. Otherwise the calamity for Australian households economic will be disastrous. We have taken that decisions of government to step up and to make this commitment to provide people with an economic lifeline over the many months ahead. But you are right, we will have to then work hard on the other side to restore the economy. Now, that’s why we are being so careful not to have things that tie the economy and the budget down off into the future. We do need to snap back to the normal arrangements on the other side of this.
Morrison says schools have been planning for a “balance – a combination of distance learning” and, for those who can’t “provide a learning environment at home, for the children to be able to return to school”.
School will return after the holidays. They just won’t be holidays that most school students have known for a long time. And when they go back, it’s the learning that matters, and we hope to have an arrangement that can return as much to normal as possible.
But we have to accept that there will be, for some protracted period of time, this combination of distance learning, and for those who can’t do that at home, no child should be turned away.
As coronavirus keeps us apart, I have developed a very wholesome thirst for the physical intimacy we used to have with friends and family
Lately, when I find myself reaching for my phone for a distraction, it’s no longer just to mindlessly swipe through Instagram stories and semi-ironically decipher my horoscope. Instead, I catch myself constantly returning to my camera roll. In particular, the photos where I’m touching my family and friends.
There’s the fuzzy Christmas party set of my colleagues and I, all cheek to cheek, craning our heads to get in a series of group selfies. There’s a backyard family lunch, me with my arm slung over my mum’s shoulder. There’s a day at the beach with my sister and her kid, us each holding a hand as we drag her back to the car. And there’s Mardis Gras night. It was just a few weeks ago but today the photos feel as though they belong in a history book. Friends and strangers covered in glitter and sweat, dancing close at a street party, arms wrapped around waists, exuberant kisses being planted on faces, all of us joyfully, drunkenly close to each other and vigorously engaged in whatever the opposite of social distancing is.
Alek Sigley was studying in Pyongyang when he was blindfolded and taken to an interrogation facility where his handlers demanded he confess to his ‘crimes’
“Do you know what day it is?” asked the man as we sat in the black Mercedes-Benz that had whisked me from the foreign student dormitory at Kim Il-sung university, where I had been living in the North Korean capital Pyongyang. I knew full well, but he answered his own question: “It’s the day the US imperialists invaded and started the war.”
It was Tuesday 25 June, and the start of my nine long days of interrogation at the hands of the North Korean ministry of state security – or at least that’s who I believed it was, as they never revealed who they actually were.
We bring together all the Covid-19 confirmed cases, data and stats from NSW, Victoria, Queensland, SA, WA, Tasmania, ACT and NT to get a broad picture of the Australian outbreak and track the impact of government response
Due to the difference in reporting times between states, territories and the federal government, it can be difficult to get a current picture of how many confirmed cases of coronavirus there are in Australia.
Here, we’ve brought together all the figures in one place, along with comparisons with other countries.
Exclusive: Mass bleaching seen along Great Barrier Reef could mark start of global-scale event, expert warns
Rising ocean temperatures could have pushed the world’s tropical coral reefs over a tipping point where they are hit by bleaching on a “near-annual” basis, according to the head of a US government agency program that monitors the globe’s coral reefs.