Source : the age
Hello and welcome to our national news live blog for Thursday, August 27. Here’s a snapshot of the day so far:
- Thirty-four Australians are among hundreds missing after deadly flash floods hit Nepal and Tibet. Nepal police said 157 bodies have so far been recovered, while China has reported at least three people killed and 265 missing in Tibet. More than 400 tourists are unaccounted for, from Australia, India, the US, UK and Canada. Follow our live coverage of the Nepal floods here.
- The world continues to mourn the loss of beloved cultural figures. After the loss of Dolly Parton earlier this week, tributes are now flowing for beloved British actor Tim Curry and world-famous visual artist Yayoi Kusama.
- Russia is preparing to escalate attacks on Ukraine after concluding that negotiations for a peace deal have reached a dead end, according to three people close to the Kremlin. CIA Director John Ratcliffe made a rare visit to Moscow on Tuesday for talks with Russian counterparts, though it’s unclear what they focused on. The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that the trip’s purpose was to warn Russia not to attack NATO countries, citing unnamed people briefed on the visit.
- Meta has reached a $24 billion settlement to add child safety measures to its Facebook and Instagram platforms, to end a landmark trial over teen social media addiction and settle claims filed by 47 states in the US.
A US military judge has set a summer (US time) 2028 trial date for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and three others accused of plotting the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
The trial is scheduled to begin on June 5, 2028, 18 months later than the January 2027 start that prosecutors had requested.
The additional time is needed to resolve pre-trial disputes, including disagreements about what evidence can be presented, Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Michael Schrama wrote in his ruling on Wednesday (US time).
The US military and successive administrations have struggled for more than two decades to bring to justice the man charged with planning one of the deadliest attacks ever on the United States.
NSW Health Minister Ryan Park has faced mounting pressure from the opposition on the beds for western Sydney promised by Premier Chris Minns in the lead-up to the 2023 election.
The highly populated region’s emergency departments have faced unprecedented demand in recent years, with one in 10 patients at Blacktown’s emergency department waiting more than 36 hours to be admitted or transferred to another hospital.
Park told budget estimates this morning that just 82 of the 600 promised beds had been delivered.
Half of the beds were promised for Rouse Hill Hospital, for which construction is now under way.
Park said the opposition had announced the north-west Sydney hospital three times throughout their 12 years in government, but did not deliver.
He said the 82 beds were located across Westmead, Nepean, and Mount Druitt hospitals, and said the government aimed to deliver an additional 30 beds at Blacktown hospital by the end of the year.
Australian business spending is up 11 per cent compared with last year, driven by an almost 80 per cent jump in investment in data centres, underscoring the strength of the sector as a driver of activity in the Australian economy.
New figures from the ABS show companies invested almost $51 billion in the second quarter, down 3.6 per cent from the first three months of the year.
The drop was largely attributed to a slowing in spending on data centres and other information technology, which is down by almost a third from the record set in the first quarter.
But the ABS noted despite the quarterly fall, total capital expenditure was 10.7 per cent higher than at the same time last year.
New research shows takeaway coffee drinkers might be receiving an unwanted shot of microplastics.
Scientists have found single-use paper cups, widely used for takeaway coffee, release millions of microplastic particles when exposed to hot liquid.
The warning comes after a University of Queensland research team looked at single-use cups lined with fossil fuel-based polyethylene (PE) and the biodegradable alternative polylactic acid (PLA).
Both types of cups were found to release plastic particles, UQ’s Queensland Alliance for Environmental Health Sciences said.
Foreign Minister Penny Wong has just held a press conference on the situation in Nepal.
She could not yet give any concrete information on the Australians reported missing following the disaster, though said the government is urgently seeking more information on their wellbeing and whereabouts.
“We will be in touch with their loved ones as soon as we have any confirmed information that we can share,” she said.
Opposition Leader Angus Taylor has pledged to reserve a third of his promised $5 billion housing fund to build homes in regional Australia.
“$1.5 billion of that will be for regional areas because we think a big part of the housing crisis can be solved by building more houses in the regions,” he told the Bush Summit in Dubbo.
“Whether it’s the wastewater treatment or the fresh water, or the power infrastructure, or the transport infrastructure, have that money ready to go fast to work with state and local government to get houses built.”
Taylor also pointed to his promise to slash most of the building regulations in the National Construction Code.
“It’s too hard to build a house in the country, whether you’re in the regions or the city. 2,000 pages of regulation telling a builder how to build a house. Builders know how to build a house,” he said.
“They have to build a woke palace. Well, we don’t all need to live in woke palaces.”
NSW Health has begun “contingency planning” around the defibrillators used across the NSW ambulance fleet which the TGA suspended from sale.
Paramedics and the TGA had raised concerns that the defibrillators unexpectedly shut down and rebooted without warning. The NSW government is locked into a six year contract with their manufacturer, corpuls.
NSW Health Minister Ryan Park told budget estimates this morning that the TGA had not indicated they planned to recall the devices, but said he was concerned about the issues raised and would “have a look at the contract and what options there are for us”.
“When a company goes into contract with us and we provide them with taxpayers’ money, then they have to provide a service that meets that. I’m concerned that a number of paramedics have said to me that the device is not doing that now.”
Popular Labor premiers Chris Minns and Peter Malinauskas have nixed suggestions they could make a tilt at federal parliament.
Speaking at the Bush Summit in Dubbo, the pair were asked which of them would get the top job in Canberra.
Minns pointed to Malinauskas.
“Boy, I will never go there,” he said.
SA Premier Peter Malinauskas said Australia’s “self-defeating” migration debate had turned to madness, as the nation’s regions struggled to find fruit pickers and build homes.
“We don’t have a migration crisis. We’ve got a housing crisis,” Malinauskas told the Bush Summit in Dubbo, warning that too-harsh migration cuts would only exacerbate the problem because most people working on housing builds came from other countries.
“I think we should spend a lot more time as a country not debating how we unwind migration, we should spend a lot more time developing the policy and making the investments increasing housing supply. But of course, that’s far less emotive, isn’t it?” he said.
“I desperately hope that 10, 15, 20 years from now, we don’t look back on this moment in time, where there’s been a surge of populism on the back of a migration debate, and ask ourselves, where did that get us? … Meanwhile, fruit’s falling on the ground because we don’t have pickers … It’s madness, and I, for one, have no reticence in the lead-up to the election and after it, making the case that we don’t need a self-defeating debate on migration. Let’s focus on the real issue, which is housing supply.”
The NAB has become the first of the nation’s big banks to predict that interest rates will be pushed up at the Reserve Bank’s meeting next month.
The NAB’s top economists, Sally Auld and Gareth Spence, this morning used a research note to say that hotter-than-expected inflation data, released yesterday, meant the RBA would likely take the cash rate to a near-15 year high of 4.6 per cent.
“RBA officials have been very clear in recent months that firstly, risks to their inflation forecast were tilted to the upside; and secondly, that if those risks were realised then the Board would respond with a rate hike,” they said.
“We think it unlikely that activity data between now and the September board meeting will be weak enough to deter the board from hiking.”
