Read the national news blog for rolling updates on today’s top stories.
Read the national news blog for rolling updates on today’s top stories.
Retiring Nationals MP and former cabinet minister Keith Pitt is expected to be appointed as Australia’s next ambassador to the Holy See.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is expected to make the announcement as soon as today. Pitt has been contacted for comment.
Senior National Party sources believe Pitt’s Queensland seat of Hinkler, which he held on a 10 per margin at the 2022 election, may be vulnerable. Pitt will no longer be able to campaign in Hinkler alongside the party’s new candidate when he takes up his Vatican post.
Pitt, a fierce enemy of Nationals leader David Littleproud, had considered challenging for the party leadership this term but announced his resignation late last year. His appointment to the Holy See has been in the works for months.
Read our coverage of the breaking news here.
Protesters will take to the streets this weekend to campaign against harmful uses of AI and urge the Australian government to help freeze advancements in what is being described as potentially “the most dangerous technology ever created”.
A global protest movement dubbed PauseAI is descending on cities including Melbourne ahead of next week’s Artificial Intelligence Action Summit, to be held in Paris. The protesters say the summit lacks any focus on AI safety.
China and the US are each racing ahead with AI development. Millions of Australians are using Chinese AI app DeepSeek and the US is spending $US500 billion to accelerate its own AI efforts, in a joint venture dubbed Stargate.
Protesters will take to the streets this weekend to campaign against harmful uses of AI and urge the Australian government to help freeze advancements in what is being described as potentially “the most dangerous technology ever created”.
A global protest movement dubbed PauseAI is descending on cities including Melbourne ahead of next week’s Artificial Intelligence Action Summit, to be held in Paris. The protesters say the summit lacks any focus on AI safety.
China and the US are each racing ahead with AI development. Millions of Australians are using Chinese AI app DeepSeek and the US is spending $US500 billion to accelerate its own AI efforts, in a joint venture dubbed Stargate.
Read the full story here.
The Federal Court has demolished the Australian Federal Police’s attempts to keep secret the details of an anti-corruption investigation that reached the top levels of the peak policing body, having rejected arguments that releasing the information would be against the public interest.
Police had refused, under freedom of information legislation, to release any details of a corruption probe into the 2018 leak that compromised one of the most controversial cases in the agency’s history – one looking into the actions of war criminal Ben Roberts-Smith.
After a four-year legal battle by this masthead, the court on Monday ruled that many of the grounds police had used to refuse the information’s release were spurious, or wrong in law.
The court’s decision comes as this masthead can reveal new details about the corruption probe into how Roberts-Smith was tipped off that he was the subject of secret federal police war crimes inquiries.
Since 2021, the AFP has spent hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars on the legal fight to keep from the public the details of how it internally handled the leaks to Roberts-Smith.
Read the full story here.
Denise Bowden, chief executive of the Yothu Yindi Foundation, said $840 million in federal funding pledged today should have a measurable impact on regional and remote Indigenous communities, and that decisions around its use should be done by Aboriginal communities.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was in Alice Springs this morning and announced $840 million in funding to support remote Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory in reaching closing the gap targets.
It’s largely a continuation of funding of essential service, with some money going towards “mediation and peacekeeping activities” aimed at addressing the youth crime issue in Alice Springs.
“We see this as an important step forward and will support both infrastructure and service delivery,” Bowden told the ABC.
She also stressed that Indigenous communities needed to be empowered to use the funding appropriately to close the gap.
“I worry that the political footballing continues to date. I think we’ve got to rise above that … we’ve all got a responsibility to ensure we’re not having this conversation [about Indigenous disadvantage] again after $840 million has been invested in the territory.”
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has again stated he won’t provide “an ongoing commentary on comments made by the president of the United States”.
Speaking to the media in Lennox Head, NSW, Albanese was asked by a reporter if he had a view on Opposition Leader Peter Dutton indicating he might support Donald Trump’s ban on transgender women competing in women’s sport.
“Peter Dutton can speak for Peter Dutton and other leaders can speak for themselves as well, around the world,” Albanese said.
“My responsibility is to look after Australia. That’s my priority and I do that diligently.”
It follows comments the prime minister made on Thursday, that he wouldn’t regularly answer questions about the US president’s actions and statements.
Some of Australia’s biggest companies including Australia Post, Canva, Telstra and PwC have quit the federal scheme that allows them to claim net-zero carbon emissions amid mounting integrity concerns.
Australian corporations have spent hundreds of millions of dollars in the past decade buying offsets in the voluntary market to reduce their climate footprint, but there are rising doubts about whether the projects generating those offsets reduce greenhouse gases.
More than 100 companies have left the Climate Active scheme in the past two years, with the damaging corporate departures prompting the federal government to consider radically reshaping or shutting down the so-called “voluntary market” in carbon credits.
Climate Active is a federal government-run voluntary register that companies join to report their carbon emissions and the offsets they are buying so they can then claim to their customers they are carbon-neutral.
Companies to have walked away include Australia Post, the Cbus superannuation fund, Telstra, NRMA, Canva and PwC. Even the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, the federal government’s $30 billion “green bank”, pulled out of Climate Active last October.
Some departing companies cite growing global scepticism over the quality of Australian and international carbon abatement certificates. Others say they now prefer to focus on directly reducing their own emissions directly rather than buying offsets.
A spokesperson for the Clean Energy Regulator, the government body that administers the Australian carbon market, said it was “highly regarded globally, compared to other carbon markets including those in Europe and the United States”.
Read the full exclusive here.
The daughter of 95-year-old Clare Nowland, who died after she was Tasered by a police officer in her NSW nursing home, has told a court she is forever haunted by the “utter disregard” of the killer’s words.
Former senior constable Kristian James Samuel White was found guilty in November of the manslaughter of Nowland after discharging his Taser as she held a knife in Cooma’s Yallambee Lodge nursing home on May 17, 2023.
CCTV and body-worn cameras captured the encounter, which lasted two to three minutes and ended with White saying “Stop, just, nah, bugger it”. Nowland, a great-grandmother who had dementia, fell backwards and hit her head. She died in hospital seven days later.
Nowland’s children and grandchildren shared their grief in victim impact statements at White’s sentence hearing in the NSW Supreme Court on Friday, describing her death as brutal, barbaric, inhumane and incomprehensible.
Her daughter Gemma Murphy said the footage of the incident had left a “grotesque image” that she cannot erase.
“The echoes of Kristian White’s words, ‘nah, bugger it’ and ‘got her’ will forever haunt me,” she said.
Read our full reporting here.
The ABC executive who removed journalist Antoinette Lattouf over a post accusing Israel of using starvation tactics did not know her exact views on the Gaza war before she was dismissed, a court has heard.
Lattouf was hired to fill a five-day timeslot on the Mornings show on ABC Radio Sydney in December 2023.
The 41-year-old was dismissed after three days on air after sharing a Human Rights Watch post on Instagram saying Israel had used starvation as a “weapon of war” in Gaza.
She is suing the ABC in the Federal Court for unfair dismissal, seeking penalties and damages.
Giving evidence on Friday, the ABC’s outgoing content chief, Chris Oliver-Taylor, told the court he did not know exactly what Lattouf’s views on the war were when he made the decision not to put her back on air.
“I’m not an expert in the Israel-Gaza war,” he said.
“I’m not an expert in nuances of the debate. I don’t want to suggest I know Ms Lattouf’s views either way, I don’t.
“I was concerned about impartiality on the ABC.”
Oliver-Taylor also denied being aware that, at the time, the ABC had received specific complaints from a pro-Israel lobby about Lattouf, adding he was unaware that she was of Lebanese background.
Follow our live blog of the court proceedings here.
AAP
Radio shock jock Kyle Sandilands has revealed his brain aneurysm will require more complicated treatment than first expected, and that his doctors have found another aneurysm, this time in his chest.
On Monday, the KIIS FM breakfast host told listeners he needed urgent surgery for an aneurysm in his brain. He has continued hosting his show with co-host Jackie “O” Henderson this week.
In their Friday morning broadcast, Sandilands said surgeons would need to drill through his skull to treat the brain aneurysm – a much more invasive treatment than had first been proposed.
The 53-year-old said doctors had planned to thread a needle through an artery to pack the aneurysm with coils, but had discovered it was on a Y-shaped junction of a blood vessel, making the procedure impossible.
“The blood pressure has been so strong through me, it’s buckled the shape of the veins,” he said.
Communication, IT and consumer stocks have lifted the Australian sharemarket into the green at lunchtime, despite opening lower following a mixed trading day for Wall Street overnight, where rising fashion and tobacco stocks worked against drops for Ford Motor and Qualcomm.
The S&P/ASX 200 rose 7.3 points or 0.1 per cent to 8528 points at 12.30pm AEDT, as healthcare and energy stocks continued to weigh on the bourse.
Domino’s investors are celebrating the pizza chain’s announcement of 205 store closures, most of which are in Japan. It is the first major move of newly installed chief executive Mark van Dyck, who has declared a focus on disciplined growth and “decisive action”. The pizza business has held its place at the top of the bourse with gains of 21.5 per cent.
KFC and Taco Bell operator Collins Foods is up 13 per cent and Audinate Group has risen 3.6 per cent. REA Group has climbed 3.3 per cent after reporting a 26 per cent rise in half-year profits and a 20 per cent lift in group revenue.
Meanwhile, Beach Energy is at the other end of the index, dipping 5.9 per cent.
Liontown Resources has slid 4.1 per cent, and News Corp has declined 4 per cent, offsetting much of yesterday’s share price climb after reporting a 5 per cent revenue rise to $US2.24 billion ($3.6 billion).
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