FORMER Prime Minister Bob Hawke was admitted to Sydney’s Royal North Shore Hospital on Monday afternoon.
The Daily Telegraph reported that the 88-year-old was taken to the hospital on Monday afternoon, where he is undergoing treatment.
It is understood that initial suggestions that the Labor giant suffered pneumonia or a stroke were incorrect.
via Former prime minister Bob Hawke has been admitted to Royal North Shore Hospital | PerthNow
A judge has apologised to an angry and weary jury, after the trial of two brothers alleged to have been harbouring scores of illegal workers at their northern suburbs tomato farm — which was originally scheduled to take eight weeks — collapsed after nearly eight months.
District Court Judge Stephen Scott today dismissed the jury which since October had been hearing the cases against Minh Canh Le, his brother Michael Le and three alleged accomplices, who were also accused of laundering the money made from the exploitation of illegal workers.
After months of detailed evidence, dozens of witnesses and numerous delays — prompted by repeated arguments from defence lawyers they had not been disclosed all the relevant evidence — the trial was officially abandoned last week.
On Monday, the remaining 12 jury members were told by Judge Scott that despite their diligence and considerable disruption to their lives, they would be not be required to bring down a verdict.
“You didn’t sign up for seven months, you didn’t sign up for 11 months – you signed up for 10 weeks,” Judge Scott said.
via Long-winded Carabooda trial abandoned after eight months | PerthNow
EMBATTLED former Labor MP Barry Urban will quit Parliament tomorrow, ahead of a report into the fake medal scandal which has engulfed his political career since late last year.
It wasrevealed in November that Mr Urban had been wearing a police service medal he wasn’t entitled to — and then lied about how he obtained it.
It is understood Mr Urban has now decided to “put the nightmare behind” him.
“I am paying a hefty price for my mistakes,” he will tell Parliament in a speech tomorrow.
“I’ve had to deal with intense media scrutiny and online harassment.
“Social media posts have been used to intimidate, humiliate and hurt me.”
STAR West Coast ruckman Nic Naitanui has been hit with a one-game ban for his tackle on Karl Amon in Saturday’s 42-point win over Port Adelaide at Optus Stadium.
Naitanui gave away a free kick when he drove Amon into the ground in a tackle in the final quarter of the match. Amon got up and was fine to take his kick but that hasn’t saved Naitanui from a ban for rough conduct.
He can also accept an $1000 sanction for attempting to trip Jasper Pittard.
Watch the tackle in the video player above.
“If you drive a player to the ground with excessive force whilst arms pinned, one of the factors in determining is whether it’s unreasonable in the circumstances,” Match Review Officer Michael Christian said.
via Nic Naitanui cops one-week ban for rough conduct at West Coast | PerthNow
IT’S a heart-stopping scene that could so easily have ended in tragedy.
The driver of a black ute entering Mitchell Freeway from the on-ramp stunned fellow motorists on Sunday morning when he appeared to lose control, spinning out into on-coming traffic.
Drivers across three lanes were forced to take emergency evasive action to avoid a collision.
Video link below;
via ‘Idiot’ ute driver spins out on Mitchell Freeway | PerthNow
Marc Marquez has won the Spanish MotoGP to take the overall points lead after several of his rivals crashed out of the race.
Pole-sitter Cal Crutchlow wiped out before a three-rider crash involving previous points leader Andrea Dovizioso, his Ducati teammate Jorge Lorenzo, and Dani Pedrosa.
Pedrosa, who underwent wrist surgery less than a month ago, was thrown high over his bike and onto the asphalt after trying to go past the two Ducatis on the inside of the sunny Jerez circuit in southern Spain.
Lorenzo came across into the corner as Dovizioso went wide, colliding with Pedrosa and sending the two Ducatis into the gravel.
All three riders walked away from the crash — not before some wild gesticulating between the drivers on the gravel near their stricken bikes — although Pedrosa complained of severe pain in his right hip.
Three men and six women have been charged over the stabbing death of a 37-year-old woman in Toowoomba on Queensland’s Darling Downs.
Detectives charged the nine people after the woman was found with critical stab wounds to the chest in a unit on McGregor Street in Wilsonton after 2:00pm on Sunday.
The woman was taken to Toowoomba Base Hospital but later died.
Officers cordoned off several areas near the crime scene including near a fast food restaurant on the Warrego Highway.
The nine people, aged between 23 and 34, have each been charged with two counts of assault occasioning bodily harm and one count of entering a dwelling with intent.
The three men and six women will face the Toowoomba Magistrates Court later this morning.
The courtyard outside the Louvre museum, where Emmanuel Macron plans to hold an election night victory party, was evacuated on police orders after a bomb threat.
Macron’s campaign press office said it was a ‘suspicious bag’ that prompted the evacuation.
Anti-terror police asked visitors and some 300 journalists to leave the historic courtyard with immediate effect following the alert at about 1pm.
Heavily armed officers and specially trained sniffer dogs then began to scour the area outside the Louvre museum where the Mona Lisa painting is one of many priceless art works on display.
Hundreds of tourists and journalists queued outside the historic building in the rain as police swarmed into the closed courtyard, which was reopened some 90 minutes later.
A witness told MailOnline: ‘The whole of the courtyard was evacuated. Everyone in the esplanade de Louvre was told to leave immediately.
‘That was about 1.15pm. Now the police are searching the area with dogs. There was a bomb threat.’
The election, in which Macron is competing against far-right candidate Marine Le Pen, is being conducted under the watch of 50,000 security forces guarding against extremist attacks.
The Louvre was already being heavily guarded after an extremist targeted soldiers near the museum during the presidential campaign.
Macron picked the dignified internal courtyard of the renowned palace-turned-museum as the location for his post-election rally.
Presidential rival Marine Le Pen will hold her post election rally at a restaurant away from the Paris centre.
MORE: Louvre courtyard evacuated in security alert | Daily Mail Online
US-based TPG Capital has put forward a proposal to buy The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and The Australian Financial Review along with Domain in a deal estimated to be worth about $2.5 billion.
Fairfax chief executive Greg Hywood held a meetings at the company’s Pyrmont headquarters on Sunday and wrote to staff in the evening confirming the proposal.
He said it was a “preliminary indicative” proposal and was still subject to a number of conditions including approval by the Foreign Investment Review Board, Fairfax reported on Sunday night.
The board is now “reviewing” the deal, Fairfax said in a statement.
The offer from TPG, which bought a five per cent stake in the media company in March, comes after Fairfax announced plans last week to shed 125 jobs to help save $30 million, prompting a week-long strike by its journalists.
“Left behind would be Fairfax’s New Zealand business, which had been seeking to merge with fellow publishing group NZME, Fairfax’s Australian regional newspaper unit, its stake in the Macquarie Media radio venture and a 50 per cent share of online streaming network Stan,” the AFR reported.
Last Thursday Fairfax revealed revenues from its news operations had dropped 11 per cent since Christmas.
The only Fairfax business units that managed to significantly lift revenue were Domain – up 10 per cent – and its digital businesses, up 18 per cent.
Fairfax has been planning to spin off Domain into a separate stock market listed entity later this year.
Last week, huge numbers of Fairfax journalists walked off the job for seven days in response to management’s plans to slash a quarter of newsroom jobs.
The media group has been struggling for years with falling revenues as a result of a drop in income from advertisers and declining circulation figures.
TPG was reported in late March to be interested in making a play for Fairfax, but a spike in the media company’s share price at the time apparently forced it to back away.
Speculation about TPG’s latest offer to Fairfax comes a day after the federal government announced a range of changes to Australia’s media laws, including long-awaited plans to scrap the two-out-of-three ownership rule that prevents a company controlling more than two of three radio, television and newspapers in one area.
The government also plans to axe the rule stopping a media proprietor from controlling a TV licence that reaches more than 75 per cent of the population.
If the proposed changes are approved by parliament they are expected to open the way for a raft of consolidation within the media industry.
Source: TPG a step closer to buying Fairfax papers | Perth Now
British ISIS bride Sally Jones has shot up the Pentagon’s kill list as it is revealed she and her late husband were responsible for planning a dozen terror plots.
Jones, a 49-year-old mother-of-two from Kent, is considered to be a ‘high priority’ for assassination in Syria.
The failed punk rocker’s extremist husband Junaid Hussain, a computer hacker from Birmingham, was wiped out by an American drone strike in Raqqa in 2015.
One foiled plot hatched by the pair involved kidnapping a former US soldier and beheading him on camera, according to The Sunday Times.
Jones abandoned her disastrous career as a punk rocker to convert to Islam before joining ISIS in 2013.
The convert has previously hinted that she might fancy becoming a suicide bomber herself, writing earlier: ‘I know what I’m doing. Paradise has a price and I hope this will be the price for Paradise’.
It is believed that Jones recruited dozens of women to ISIS via social media before her accounts were shut down.
She is also believed to be using her 11-year-old son Jojo as a human shield.
After her husband’s death, it is thought she received a monthly salary from ISIS of £520, plus a bonus of more than £200 every couple of months for being the widow of a ‘shahid’ or martyr.
According to one activist she is yet to remarry because ‘she is considered old and ISIS fighters prefer young girls.’
MORE HERE: British jihadi Sally Jones shoots up Pentagon’s kill list | Daily Mail Online
Postwar Germany began its second biggest evacuation of a major city on Sunday as ordnance disposal experts moved in to Hanover to tackle five RAF bombs from World War II found on building sites.
Fifty thousand people from flats, houses, care homes and clinics were on the move in Hanover at 9.00am and told they won’t be allowed back for up to 24 hours. The number amounts to ten per cent of the city’s population.
Hanover was hit 125 times by Allied air forces during the war. The unstable duds that must be tackled date from a raid in October 1943 when 260,000 high explosive and incendiary devices were dropped.
The raid killed 1,245 locals and left a further 250,000 homeless.
Hanover was often a target for Allied forces in World War II. It was a vital railway junction through which two major east-west and north-south routes passed.
Additionally, it was an industrial city where tyres for military vehicles and aircraft were produced.
The Hanover evacuation was only topped by a mass movement of people in Augsburg on Christmas Eve last year when 54,000 people were forced from their homes by unexplored wartime bombs.
Thousands of helpers from across the state of Lower Saxony have been drafted in to aid in the Hanover evacuation.
Schools have been opened to accommodate those with nowhere to go. Long distance trains have been rerouted to avoid the city’s main train station.
The ‘iron harvest’ of bombs and munitions continues to be a huge headache for Germany 72 years after the end of the war.
It is estimated that 150,000 bombs lie unexploded beneath German towns and cities and they grow more unstable with every passing day.
Dozens have been killed and injured in explosions in the past decades and thousands placed in danger.
More here: Hanover evacuates 50,000 after five RAF bombs are found | Daily Mail Online
A 32-year-old man has lost an arm and a foot after climbing on to a moving bulk freight train in Western Australia.
He was with his brother, 34, and the pair are believed to have been intoxicated when he fell between a break in the carriages about 7.30pm on Saturday.
The train was passing through Brookvale in Perth when he fell and the train severed his arm and foot.
Imagery of his rescue was shared by the local police force to Twitter, alongside a warning message to others trying to use the train as a shortcut across the tracks.
‘A lucky outcome for what could have been potentially deadly,’ they wrote.
‘A reminder why we wait for trains to pass before attempting to cross.’
The other brother made his way across the carriage and to the other side of the track without injury
Source: Man loses arm and foot after trying to cross train track | Daily Mail Online
The email was allegedly sent to researchers at the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER). It was first shared via Twitter by journalist Paul Thacker and reads:
Please excuse me for sending this out to your entire group via your listserv, but I was alerted by a member in your group and I wanted to let everyone know that the reason for the change from CNN to FOX.
The reason for the change is that a decision from the current administration administrative officials has requested that all monitors, under our control, on the White Oak Campus, display FOX news.
A CBER employee told BuzzFeed News the email came after multiple employees spoke out against the channel change.
A lot of the staff were very upset about the change
After some complaints about the switch, we all received an email saying that the current administration ordered the change.
Another FDA employee told Buzzfeed News that he thought the news would put people off the FDA.
My biggest fear about having a ‘right wing’ news source playing in our halls is that it will drive away some people on the left who are already suspicious about FDA being a shill for big pharma.
We put a lot of work into disseminating health and safety information, but it’s not helpful for people who think it’s all a ploy and ignore it.
However, FDA have denied the claims, explaining that a variety of news stations run on the screens on the common areas of the campus, including CNN, MSNBC and FOX news.
There was no directive or memorandum from the Administration that went out to employees about broadcast news channels displaying on monitors in common areas throughout the FDA’s White Oak campus.
Despite that, in a statement sent to ThinkProgress, an FDA spokesperson did not dispute the validity of the email.
Still, Fox News being shown in a government agency is particularly worrying due to it’s unreliable science coverage. A 2012 study showed that 93% of Fox’s climate change reporting is misleading.
Source: Trump team ‘bans federal employees from watching anything other than Fox News’ | indy100
