source : the age
Hello and welcome to our coverage of national news for Wednesday, September 16. Here’s what is making headlines today.
Police and PSOs would have the power to randomly search people anywhere in public with metal detectors, without needing a warrant or reasonable suspicion they have a weapon, under an election promise by Premier Ben Carroll.
Carroll pledged to implement a version of “Jack’s Law” in Victoria today, modelled on a law first introduced in Queensland and copied in NSW, Tasmania, Western Australia and the Northern Territory.
Named after 17-year-old Jack Beasley, who was fatally stabbed in Surfers Paradise in 2019, the law would allow police to use handheld metal detector “wands” to search anyone in a public place for knives.
The Coalition has also pushed for Jack’s Law to be implemented, meaning it is likely to be legislated in some form by whichever party wins the November 28 election.
Hollywood filmmaker Rob Reiner ’s son will not face the death penalty on charges he fatally stabbed his parents after lying in wait at their home in Los Angeles late last year, prosecutors said.
If convicted, the maximum sentence 33-year-old Nick Reiner could get is life without the possibility of parole, Los Angeles County District Attorney Nathan Hochman said.
He said his office had done a thorough review, including speaking to Rob and Michele Singer Reiner’s families and evaluating mitigating factors in Nick Reiner’s favour.
Nick Reiner, who briefly appeared at a court hearing overnight, has twice pleaded not guilty. The death penalty had been on the table because of the lying-in-wait allegation, the fact that multiple people were killed, and the use of a knife, which is considered a dangerous weapon.
Housing Minister Clare O’Neill has rejected claims the housing market is “tanking” after the Housing Industry Association recorded another 10 per cent fall in new home sales in August.
“We’ve got a broken housing market in this country, which is hurting millions of Australians,” O’Neill told Seven’s Sunrise this morning, adding that the industry association’s figures didn’t paint the full picture.
She said the government’s biggest concern was the decades of decline in home ownership rates among young people: “The problem before was that you basically [had] investors being subsidised by the young people of this country.”
Opposition senator Michaelia Cash said Labor’s tax changes were to blame for issues in the housing market.
British nurse Lucy Letby was able to murder seven babies because of a “complete failure” to protect babies at the hospital at which she worked, and some of the deaths could have been avoided, the chair of an inquiry said overnight.
Inquiry chair Kathryn Thirlwall criticised senior staff for not acting sooner, blaming dysfunctional management at the Countess of Chester Hospital, in northern England, and a basic lack of understanding of safeguarding.
Letby, 36, was convicted in 2023 of murdering seven newborns and attempting to murder six others, making her Britain’s most prolific serial child killer of modern times. She was later convicted of another attempted murder charge.
Prosecutors said Letby attacked the newborns by giving them an overdose of insulin, injecting them with air or force-feeding them milk between June 2015 and June 2016, in a case that shocked Britain and drew worldwide attention.
Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang has rejected calls for new artificial intelligence laws, telling the Dreamforce conference in San Francisco this morning that safety could be solved by engineers rather than regulators.
“The market forces are already there,” Huang said. “We don’t need any new laws, we don’t need any new regulations.”
His comments came days after Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei called for a coordinated industry slowdown and independent auditing of safety work, a position backed in part by OpenAI, Google DeepMind and SpaceX.
Huang said safety was “job one” but described it as an engineering problem. Companies should not release products they were not confident in, he said, and could pause voluntarily without government involvement.
The chipmaker is the largest beneficiary of AI development. Huang spoke a day after US President Donald Trump telephoned him mid-interview in Los Angeles to call AI safety fears “a hoax”, according to The New York Times. Some 50,000 attendees are in San Francisco for Salesforce’s annual AI conference, and about 10 million are tuning in online according to the company.
David Swan travelled to San Francisco as a guest of Salesforce.
A man has been charged with allegedly assaulting a nurse and patients at a hospital in Sydney’s inner west last night.
Officers were called to the emergency department of a hospital in Missenden Road, Camperdown at about 5.30pm yesterday, following reports of a 52-year-old man assaulting multiple people.
Police will allege the man approached a 45-year-old female health worker and punched her to the head. He then allegedly punched a 65-year-old man and a 65-year-old woman who were also awaiting treatment.
The 45-year-old female health care worker is then alleged to have restrained the man prior to the arrival of security staff and police.
The man was arrested and taken to Newtown Police Station where he was charged with two counts of common assault and one count of assault frontline health worker no actual bodily harm.
He was refused bail and will appear before the bail court today.
The United States has confirmed for the first time that it has deployed weapons in space, a remarkable revelation after previous warnings about countries such as Russia possibly weaponising a global frontier long agreed in treaties to be used for only peaceful purposes.
Air Force Secretary Troy Meink told the Air and Space Cyber Conference in Maryland yesterday that the US has fielded “on-orbit space control weapons capable of defending the Joint Force against hostile adversary action”.
Meink did not detail what the weapons were, how they work or if they were targeting other objects in space or on Earth. The US had warned two years ago that Russia was developing a new space-based, anti-satellite weapon, though the White House said the danger wasn’t imminent at the time.
But reports of the anti-satellite weapon reflected longstanding worries about space threats from Russia and China, given that much US infrastructure is dependent on satellite communications. The US has also previously demonstrated its own abilities to shoot down satellites from Earth.
Hello and welcome to our coverage of national news for Wednesday, September 16. Here’s what is making headlines today.
