Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
West Australian police are using drones and aircraft to create a detailed map of the Blowholes campsite as they look for “disturbances in the sand” during the ongoing investigation into the disappearance of four-year-old Cleo Smith.
Police recruits are also sifting through a mountain of rubbish collected from roadside bins stretching more than 600km along Western Australia’s north-west coast in the hope of finding any clue that could lead to Cleo.
The search for the missing four-year-old has captured the world’s attention, but police have yet to make a breakthrough in the baffling case
The days are long for Det Supt Rod Wilde, the man tasked with unravelling what happened to four-year-old Cleo Smith at the Blowholes campsite in Western Australia.
With 40 years of policing under his belt, including 18 with the major crime squad, Wilde is no stranger to missing children cases or working under the glare of media scrutiny.
Two men have been taken to hospital after being stabbed inside a Melbourne shopping centre.
Both suffered non-life-threatening injuries during the attack at Barkly Square in Brunswick just after 8am on Monday, and were taken to hospital in stable condition.
Inspired by hit podcasts and documentaries, ordinary people are trying to track down fugitives and reopen cold cases. But should they be?
Although the story you are about to read involves a fugitive, law enforcement and a six-month chase across Mexico, for Billy Jensen it was just another day on the job. In 2017, Jensen was on the hunt for a pale, ginger, tattooed California killer hiding out in Mexico. Jensen uploaded a photo of the fugitive to Facebook. “¿Has visto a este hombre?” he asked, using Facebook’s targeted ad tools to ensure the post was seen by people living near American bars. Tips came flooding in. One tipster snapped a photo. In just 24 hours, Jensen had his guy.
Unfortunately, the killer was on the move. It took half a year of similar posts for the 49-year-old Jensen to finally get the suspect apprehended by the Mexican police – for Jensen isn’t a police officer himself, or a detective, or an FBI agent. He is a podcaster, author, journalist, and self-described “citizen sleuth”.
Billed as the most secure phone on the planet, An0m became a viral sensation in the underworld. There was just one problem for anyone using it for criminal means: it was run by the police
The rain pattered lightly on the harbour of the Belgian port city of Ghent when, on 21 June 2021, a team of professional divers slipped below the surface into the emerald murk. The Brazilian tanker, heavy with fruit juice bound for Australia, had already crossed the Atlantic Ocean, but its journey wasn’t halfway done as the divers felt their way along the barnacled serration of its hull. They were looking for the sea chest, a metallic inlet below the water line, through which the ship draws seawater to cool its engines. Tucked inside, they found what they were looking for: three long sacks, each wrapped in a thick black plastic bag and trussed with black and white striped nautical rope.
The sacks were heavy. Each one weighed as much as a sheep and, shaped like a body bag, could feasibly have contained one. As the Belgian police opened the first bag, a stack of crimson bricks slid out. Had this cargo reached Australia, where high demand and meagre supply has pushed the price of a kilo of cocaine to eight times its equivalent cost in North America, the haul would have been worth more than A$64m (£34m).
Sydney academic Dianne Jolley, who is accused of sending herself threatening letters, has admitted to writing one note at work
A former dean of science at the University of Technology Sydney accused of sending threatening letters to herself and colleagues has been found not guilty of nine charges.
In the NSW district court on Monday, judge Ian Bourke ordered the jury to find Dianne Jolley not guilty of three counts of sending a letter to induce a false belief it would cause danger.
Federal court hears Sydney woman, whose decomposing foot washed up on remote NSW beach, had 37 bank accounts
Sydney businesswoman Melissa Caddick faked many documents in the “quite elaborate fraud” she used to swindle trusting investors out of more than $23m, a judge has been told.
She operated 37 bank accounts, sent investors fictitious portfolio evaluations and kept “meticulous” records, Farid Assad SC said in the federal court on Tuesday.
European and Australian police join forces with FBI to seize weapons, drugs and $148m in cash
A global sting in which organised crime gangs were sold encrypted phones that law enforcement officials could monitor has led to more than 800 arrests in 18 countries.
The operation by the FBI and Australian and European police, ensnared suspects in Australia, Asia, Europe, South America and the Middle East involved in the narcotics trade.
Police say the arrests of Sewell and another man in Melbourne followed an investigation into an alleged armed robbery
Australian neo-Nazi Tom Sewell has been charged by police in Victoria over an alleged armed robbery earlier this month.
On Friday, counter-terrorism police arrested two men – 28-year-old Sewell and another 22-year-old – and executed search warrants in Eildon Parade in the Melbourne suburb of Rowville.
ACT Liberal leader Elizabeth Lee is trying to change legislation to explicitly criminalise the act amid a rise in disturbing rhetoric
One in three women and one in five men globally have been the victim of “stealthing”, the non-consensual act of removing a condom during sex, yet the term has only recently entered public awareness – and courtrooms.
“Anecdotally, stealthing was something that felt yuck, confusing, violating and wrong,” the Australian Capital Territory’s Liberal opposition leader, Elizabeth Lee, says. “But victims of it didn’t even know it had a name, let alone that it negated their consent.”
A group of eminent scientists has cast doubt on the guilt of Kathleen Folbigg, jailed in 2003 for killing four of her children
Prominent scientists are calling for the release of convicted New South Wales child killer Kathleen Folbigg, saying there’s strong evidence she is innocent.
Folbigg was jailed in 2003 for murdering her children Patrick, Sarah and Laura, and for the manslaughter of her son Caleb.
A third woman has come forward to allege she was sexually assaulted by the same political staffer accused of raping a colleague inside Parliament House.
The woman says she was assaulted while working as a Coalition volunteer during the 2016 election campaign, after a night out drinking with the then-political staffer. She was barely out of school at the time.
Prime minister says his wife, Jenny, urged him to respond to Higgins’ allegation ‘as a father first’
Scott Morrison has drafted one of his own MPs and a deputy secretary of his department to develop options to improve “the environment” of Parliament House after allegations from former government staffer Brittany Higgins that she was raped by a colleague in 2019.
The prime minister told reporters on Tuesday he had asked Liberal backbencher Celia Hammond, a former university vice-chancellor, to lead a process of internal consultation about how to improve “professional behaviour” in political offices.
NSW and Victoria report no new local Covid cases as hotel quarantine worker in Melbourne diagnosed with UK variant. Follow all the latest news and updates, live
On the vaccine distribution in Australia, Paul Kelly says it is still on track for the first injections to be happening before the end of February, but will not put an exact timeline on it.
The aim will be to get 20 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine before the end of this year, in weekly deliveries. Kelly said the AstraZeneca and Novovax vaccines will also be used if and when they are approved by the TGA:
We don’t want a lot of vaccines sitting out in warehouses, so we will be looking to roll out particularly for those priority populations that people will know about now, as soon as we can. But then will be going back to the same population, those people, to give them a second dose. That is really important.
We will await the TGA advice in relation to AstraZeneca but some of the information that has been coming up in the last few weeks is that it may actually be a longer interval for that second dose.”
Australia’s chief medical officer, Prof Paul Kelly, is also moving to reassure people about the effectiveness of the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine.
He said it was still in the process of being approved by the Therapeutics Goods Administration, and talked down claims it was less effective in treating the South African variant of the virus.
I just want to make a very clear statement about people taking small amounts of information quickly, without looking at it carefully. And making conclusions. At the moment, I can absolutely say, and this may change in future, and we will be nimble in the way we look at that information, and putting that into our planning, but at the moment, there’s no evidence anywhere in the world AstraZeneca effectiveness against severe infection is affected by any of these variants of concern.
And that is the fact. What we have at the moment is a small group of people in a study not yet peer-reviewed or published in South Africa where there was an effect on the mild or moderate disease in relation to that variant of concern in that country. But there were no severe infections in any of the people that received the vaccine in regards to any of those types of the virus.”
Kayley Ketley and Latia Henderson allegedly detained the 24-year-old victim in Sydney before driving south on the Hume Highway
An alleged kidnapping victim who was rescued after waving through a hole in her own car’s boot had been detained for 13 hours, a NSW court has been told.
The 24-year-old woman was found with multiple stab wounds in the boot of her Holden sedan after it was pulled over on the Hume Highway at Berrima, south of Sydney, on Wednesday.
Jason Renwick had pleaded not guilty to sexual assault over the 2019 incident in Brisbane, which he said was a ‘workplace accident’
A jury has been unable to reach a verdict in the case of a police sergeant charged with indecently touching a female colleague during a training exercise.
Jason Scott Renwick, 49, pleaded not guilty to one count of sexual assault over the incident at a Brisbane training facility in February 2019.
Victoria police say the woman’s husband – the father of the children – is assisting detectives but it would be unfair to presume culpability
A woman and her three young children have been found dead at a home in Melbourne’s north.
Victoria police said the woman’s husband, and the father of the three children, was assisting with the investigation but people should not presume culpability on that basis because “that would be grossly unfair”.