What we covered today
Thanks for joining us today, here’s a quick wrap of events:
- Specialist police officers bearing assault rifles will begin training exercises on Sydney’s streets in the coming weeks, as a rapid response unit formed following the Bondi massacre starts a new phase of training.
- Government ministers are giving mixed messages about the ATO’s plan to stop accepting credit card payments for its bills from December. The tax office has dug in in recent days, saying it can not absorb the impact of new rules banning it from passing credit card surcharges onto customers.
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Australian data centre start-up Firmus’ plans for a $44 billion sharemarket listing are on life support after investors baulked at the price, with its bankers scrambling to stop the public offering from being called off.
- In the US, President Donald Trump has defended his immigration policies during a visit to Texas, as he seeks to improve a Republican candidate’s fortunes ahead of November’s midterm elections.
- And millionaire fitness guru Sam Wood will stay behind bars, after a Queensland court heard he allegedly choked his wife and banged her head against the floor. Read more here.
Sam Wood fails in bid for bail
Millionaire fitness guru Sam Wood will stay behind bars, after a Queensland court heard he allegedly choked his wife and banged her head against the floor.
Wood, 46, faces domestic violence allegations, including assault occasioning bodily harm and strangulation, after an incident in accommodation on Hastings Street in Noosa in Queensland’s Sunshine Coast on Saturday evening.
At a hearing in a local Sunshine Coast court on Thursday afternoon, Wood appeared via video link before a court packed with more than a dozen journalists.
Crossbencher calls for more funding for AI safety institute
Teal MP Kate Chaney says she wants to see Australia’s AI Safety Institute better funded, as a parliamentary committee continues to probe the risks and potential rewards of embracing artificial intelligence.
Chaney, who is on the committee, told ABC News the institute only received $7.5 million a year.
“Some of these AI companies are giving hundreds of millions of dollar sign-on bonuses to staff, so we’re just not in the game,” she said. “If we upskill and add resources to the institute, it means when we do put conditions on these companies, we will be able to work out whether they are complying with those conditions or not.”
Earlier today, the committee heard from tech companies OpenAI and Anthropic. They and other companies are backing strict energy consumption rules for data centres, but also said the government must hold up its end of the bargain.
Coal demand set to plunge as the world goes electric
The world is not electrifying fast enough to limit global warming, a study has found, but stronger policies and existing technology could boost progress and slash fossil fuel demand.
Climate Resource issued the findings on Thursday from a report funded by the Australian government and released on the final day of the Pacific pre-COP31 summit in Fiji.
At the conference, Australia endorsed a rooftop solar plan at the event designed to double the number of homes with the technology by 2030, from 150 million to 300 million.
Australia led the world in rooftop solar installations, Energy Minister Chris Bowen said. “We’re working with other countries to spread rooftop solar more around the world,” he said.
High Court throws out Mark Latham’s defamation appeal bid
The nation’s highest court has rejected a bid by former NSW One Nation leader Mark Latham to appeal against a damning decision that he defamed Sydney MP Alex Greenwich.
In a decision on Thursday, the High Court refused Latham special leave to appeal against a decision last year of the Full Court of the Federal Court.
The Full Court had rejected Latham’s appeal against a 2024 decision ordering him to pay $140,000 in damages to Greenwich over a highly graphic and offensive comment posted on Twitter, now X, in March 2023.
Latham was also ordered in 2025 to pay Greenwich’s legal costs, taking the estimated total he was expected to pay to more than $500,000.
Iron ore exports under pressure as China stand-off hits Fortescue
Billionaire Andrew Forrest’s Fortescue Metals Group has suffered a fall in iron ore sales amid a stand-off with Beijing over prices.
Fortescue, the nation’s third-largest iron ore miner, is locked in contract negotiations with China Mineral Resources Group, Beijing’s centralised iron ore buyer created to leverage the country’s massive purchasing power against foreign suppliers.
On Thursday, Fortescue reported that its exports of the steel-making raw material from its mines in Western Australia over the past three months had fallen from the same time last year, and its sales volumes were nearly 4 million tonnes lower than the amount it had loaded onto ships.
The company attributed the slump to “impacts from ongoing negotiations” with the Beijing-backed iron ore buyer.
Protesters led out in handcuffs at Trump’s Texas rally
President Donald Trump defended his immigration policies during a visit to Texas on Wednesday as he sought to boost struggling GOP Senate candidate Ken Paxton ahead of November’s midterm elections.
“The only thing standing between you and the migrant conquest, the invasion that you had just two years ago – for four years you suffered – the only thing you have to stop that is a guy named Ken Paxton,” Trump said at a rally in San Antonio, a majority Hispanic city.
His speech was interrupted multiple times by protesters, who were then led out of the venue – some of them in handcuffs – before Trump began to speak again.
The president stepped away from the microphone briefly after one interruption.
Margaret Hamilton, computing pioneer that helped put man on the moon, dies aged 90
Tributes are flowing for Margaret Hamilton, the American computer scientist whose software was crucial to allowing the first moon landing to take place.
The Massachussetts Institute of Technology, where Hamilton worked for decades, announced her death on Thursday Australian time. She was 90.
Hamilton worked on the on-board software for NASA’s Apollo missions to the moon in the 1960s, and a workaround she implemented saved the Apollo 11 mission – the one carrying astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin – from having to be aborted at the last minute.
“To say Margaret Hamilton was a pioneer – to say she was ahead of her time – would be a dramatic understatement. She not only developed advanced code herself but also led a team in using that nascent technology to develop one of the most complex systems that humanity had ever achieved,” said interim head of the MIT Department Aeronautics and Astronautics Olivier de Weck.
Trial against Bankstown nurses accused of antisemitism delayed
The high-profile trial of two nurses accused of making antisemitic comments to an Israeli influencer has been delayed.
Ahmad Rashad Nadir, 28, and Sarah Abu Lebdeh, 27, have pleaded not guilty to being menacing and offensive when they allegedly said they would refuse to treat Israeli patients and threatened violence against them.
Abu Lebdeh also denies a charge that she threatened violence to a group
The pair’s trial was to begin on Monday before the listing was vacated on Thursday morning.
Medicare hack to shape Australia’s AI laws, Charlton says
The federal government is leaning towards making frontier AI companies prove they have systems to catch serious risks, saying voluntary codes cannot work while the labs race each other.
Assistant Minister for the Digital Economy Andrew Charlton said every indication was that frontier labs were “putting capability ahead of safety”.
“You cannot ask firms to volunteer against their own competitive interest amid a manic race involving trillions of dollars and then be surprised when they do not,” he told the Sydney Trust and Safety Festival on Thursday.
Charlton said Australia could learn from “systems-based” regulation used in workplace safety and banking. Under that model, companies must find, test, report and manage their risks, and are held accountable for whether that process works.
Detailed rules could be “out of date before the ink is dry”, he said.
Charlton said lessons from the Medicare incident, in which an OpenAI agent breached a government system, would shape the government’s planned AI standards legislation.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: www.smh.com.au
