Oldest evidence of fire-lighting comes from early humans in Britain
An excavation in Suffolk, UK, has uncovered pyrite and flint that appear to have been used by ancient humans to light fires some 400,000 years ago ⌘ Read more

Christmas cards remind prisoners they are ‘not forgotten’ over the holidays
Two Adelaide women have made it their mission to collect 2,000 Christmas cards for prisoners who’ll spend this year’s festive season behind bars. ⌘ Read more

Thousands forced to flee as Thailand-Cambodia border clashes spread
More than 140,000 civilians have been evacuated from border regions since fresh fighting between Thailand and Cambodia began on Sunday, officials said. ⌘ Read more

India’s Aviation Crisis Is All About Too Big to Tame
India’s dominant airline IndiGo has cancelled roughly 3,000 flights since last week after new pilot fatigue regulations collided with technical issues and the seasonal schedule shift, stranding more than half a million passengers and forcing aviation authorities to reverse course on the safety rules they had just implemented.

InterGlobe Aviation, IndiGo’s parent company, … ⌘ Read more

Senators accuse telcos of Triple Zero ‘cover-up’ over system failures
Almost 100,000 Samsung phones still can’t reliably call Triple Zero, and the inquiry into the system has revealed dysfunctional communications between telcos, regulators and the federal government. ⌘ Read more

Amazon Pitches AI Tools as Co-Workers While Axing Jobs
Amazon used its annual re:Invent cloud conference in Las Vegas to pitch a vision of the workplace where AI agents serve not as tools but as “co-workers” and “teammates,” even as the company proceeds with eliminating roughly 14,000 corporate jobs in its second major workforce reduction in recent years.

AWS CEO Matt Garman predicted on stage that autonomous “frontier agent … ⌘ Read more

50,000 new apprenticeships promised in youth employment push
Funding will be used to help employ young people in sectors including AI, hospitality and engineering. ⌘ Read more

50,000 new apprenticeships promised to tackle youth unemployment
Funding will be used to help employ young people in sectors including AI, hospitality and engineering. ⌘ Read more

50,000 new apprenticeships promised in youth employment push
Funding will be used to help employ young people in sectors including AI, hospitality and engineering. ⌘ Read more

Woman who blackmailed Son Heung-min gets four years in jail
The woman claiming she was carrying the ex-Tottenham captain’s child and extorted $200,000 from him. ⌘ Read more

College Students Flock To A New Major: AI
AI is the second-largest major at M.I.T. after computer science, reports the New York Times. (Alternate URL here.) Though that includes students interested in applying AI in biology and health care — it’s just the beginning:

This semester, more than 3,000 students enrolled in a new college of artificial intelligence and cybersecurity at the University of South Florida in Tampa.
At the Unive … ⌘ Read more

Government promises 50,000 new apprenticeships in youth employment push
Funding will be used to help employ young people in sectors including AI, hospitality and engineering. ⌘ Read more

Young people to lose benefits if they turn down work, says minister
Pat McFadden says they would need a “good reason” to decline one of 55,000 new work placements. ⌘ Read more

Young people on benefits to be offered construction and hospitality work
The government says it will fund training and work experience for 350,000 not in work or education. ⌘ Read more

Young people on benefits to be offered construction and hospitality work
The government says it will fund training and work experience for 350,000 not in work or education. ⌘ Read more

Prime minister’s office approved Wells’s almost-$100,000 flights
The furore over Communications Minister Anika Wells’s expenses continues, with just three days until the government’s much-anticipated social media ban for under 16s comes into force. ⌘ Read more

Beloved by Instagrammers, walk closed to preserve paperbark forest
Bush Heritage Australia says it is still considering how to safely reopen the walk, which prior to closure was being visited by 100,000 people a year. ⌘ Read more

Porridge is on the menu but budget politics is about to get spicier
How does a treasurer tell households the government will no longer continue a $300 energy rebate when it’s happy to blow $100,000 on three flights? ⌘ Read more

Officer’s claim about search for woman killed by partner tested at watchdog hearing
A Law Enforcement Conduct Commission is examining why it took police officers nearly an hour to respond to a Triple Zero (000) call about an assault which left Lindy Lucena dead at the hands of her partner. ⌘ Read more

Does working from home impact mental health? Here’s what 16,000 people say
Working from home can positively impact the mental health of Australian men and women in different ways, according to a new study of more than 16,000 people. ⌘ Read more

Cricket fanatic crisscrossing Australia on Vespa to attend every Ashes Test
One man, one little yellow Vespa and a 12,000-kilometre road trip to attend every Ashes Test. ⌘ Read more

Victoria to cut 1,000 public service jobs
The job cuts come after top bureaucrat Helen Silver was given the task of streamlining Victoria’s public service. ⌘ Read more

Was your car one of 40,000 damaged in hailstorms? Here’s what to do next
Insurers are urging those with damaged cars to make their claims as soon as possible in the aftermath of hailstorms across Queensland and parts of New South Wales. ⌘ Read more

Fresh probe into Lisa Lynn’s death stalls over $9,000 bill, family says
The family of the late first wife of High Country killer Greg Lynn says a fresh investigation into her death has stalled because police won’t pay for an expert report. ⌘ Read more

Brisbane block sizes slashed to 120 square metres under proposed changes
The proposed changes, including to block sizes and car parking requirements, are intended to add an additional 6,000 homes by 2032. ⌘ Read more

Tasmania to pay $650,000 for Foo Fighters concert in Launceston
Tasmania’s “biggest concert ever” will take place at Launceston’s York Park next month when American rock band Foo Fighters play their only Australian show. ⌘ Read more

Ancient human artefacts found near caves in Arabian desert
Today, the deserts of the Arabian peninsula are inhospitable – but 100,000 years ago, the area was full of animals and ancient humans ⌘ Read more

New NAPLAN results released as parents warned against raw comparisons
Parents can check the latest NAPLAN scores for 10,000 schools across the country on the MySchool website. ⌘ Read more

Canberra man who performed Nazi salute jailed over road rage incidents
A Canberra man has been jailed over a string of road rage attacks committed “for trivial reasons”, and fined $10,000 for performing a Nazi salute outside a Queensland synagogue. ⌘ Read more

Ex-Flight Centre employee jailed for stealing $40,000 from Canberra branch
A 39-year-old man has been jailed for two years after stealing cash from a secure drawer at Flight Centre in Canberra at least seven times, and then mountinga campaign of dishonesty” to delay sentencing. ⌘ Read more

‘We Built a Database of 290,000 English Medieval Soldiers’
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Conversation, written by authors Adrian R. Bell, Anne Curry, and Jason Sadler: When you picture medieval warfare, you might think of epic battles and famous monarchs. But what about the everyday soldiers who actually filled the ranks? Until recently, their stories were scattered across handwritten manuscripts i … ⌘ Read more

Top Consultancies Freeze Starting Salaries as AI Threatens ‘Pyramid’ Model
Major consulting firms including McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group and Bain have frozen starting salaries for the third consecutive year as AI reshapes how these companies think about their traditional reliance on large cohorts of junior analysts. Job offers for 2026 show undergraduate packages holding steady at $135,000-$140,00 … ⌘ Read more

Airbus Says Most of Its Recalled 6,000 A320 Jets Now Modified
Airbus said Monday that the vast majority of around 6,000 A320-family jets affected by an emergency software recall have now been modified, leaving fewer than 100 aircraft still requiring work after a frantic weekend of repairs prompted by the discovery of a vulnerability to solar flares. The unprecedented recall – described as the broadest emergency a … ⌘ Read more

More than 1,000 dead after extreme flooding across Asia
Indonesia, Thailand and Sri Lanka are reeling from flooding that has killed hundreds in each country and destroyed communities. ⌘ Read more

AI Helps Drive Record $11.8B in Black Friday Online Spending
Earlier this month MasterCard noted that even Walmart now allows its customers to make purchases through ChatGPT. And after polling more than 4,000 consumers in the U.S., Canada, U.K., and UAE, they found “more than four in 10 consumers already use AI tools to help them shop, including 61% of Gen Z and 57% of millennials.”

Many (50% of Gen Z and 49% of millenn … ⌘ Read more

Why tiny Barbados said good by to the royal family
With countries like Australia still debating whether or not the time has come to become a republic, what prompted tiny Barbados with its population of less than 300,000, to take the leap? ⌘ Read more

Airbus Issues Major A320 Recall, Threatening Global Flight Disruption
Europe’s Airbus said on Friday it was ordering immediate repairs to 6,000 of its widely used A320 family of jets in a sweeping recall affecting more than half the global fleet, threatening upheaval during the busiest travel weekend of the year in the United States and disruption worldwide. From a report: The setback appears to be among t … ⌘ Read more

DNA study backs archaeological evidence of Indigenous Australians’ arrival
A new genetic study has found Indigenous Australians travelled over two distinct routes, and 100 kilometres of open water, to reach the ancient landmass that would become Australia 60,000 to 65,000 years ago. ⌘ Read more

Robots and AI Are Already Remaking the Chinese Economy
China installed 295,000 industrial robots last year – nearly nine times as many as the United States and more than the rest of the world combined – as the country races to automate its manufacturing base amid rising labor costs at home and tariff threats from abroad.

The nation’s stock of operational robots surpassed 2 million in 2024, according to the Intern … ⌘ Read more

Seven Years Later, Airbus is Still Trying To Kick Its Microsoft Habit
Breaking free from Microsoft is harder than it looks. Airbus began migrating its 100,000-plus workforce from Office to Google Workspace more than seven years ago and it still hasn’t completed the switch. The Register: As we exclusively revealed in March 2018, the aerospace giant told 130,000 employees it was ditching Microsoft’s productivit … ⌘ Read more

Controversy over City of Perth’s $125,000 workplace culture review
Internal revolt intensifies at the City of Perth over the newly elected lord mayor’s pursuit of a ratepayer-funded workplace culture review, in a process deemed unlawful by his own administration. ⌘ Read more

AI Can Technically Perform 12% of US Labor Market’s Wage Value, MIT Simulation Finds
Researchers at MIT and Oak Ridge National Laboratory have built a simulation that models all 151 million American workers and their skills, then maps those skills against the capabilities of over 13,000 AI tools currently in production to see where the two overlap. The answer, according to their analysis: 11.7 … ⌘ Read more

Victorian premier demands answers after copper thieves trigger Optus crisis
Jacinta Allan has sought an urgent briefing after another Optus outage left more than 14,000 customers in the lurch. ⌘ Read more

75,000 without power as ‘ferocious’ storms lash NSW
A man suffers multiple injuries in a wild storm that brings down trees and powerlines and cuts electricity to tens of thousands of people in the NSW Central West. ⌘ Read more

HP To Cut About 6,000 Jobs By 2028, Ramps Up AI Efforts
HP plans to cut 4,000-6,000 jobs by 2028 “as part of a plan to streamline operations and adopt artificial intelligence,” reports Reuters. From the report: HP’s teams focused on product development, internal operations and customer support will be impacted by the job cuts, CEO Enrique Lores said during a media briefing call. “We expect this initiative will create $1 billi … ⌘ Read more

Breaking: Optus investigating ‘significant’ outage south of Melbourne
Calls to emergency services have been impacted by the outage, the telco confirmed, with more than 14,000 customers affected. ⌘ Read more

Newly formed Queensland company secures 1,000 coal mining jobs
A newly formed Queensland company has taken over a majority shareholding in a Bowen Basin coal mine, securing 1,000 jobs. ⌘ Read more

Adolescence Lasts Into 30s - New Study Shows Four Pivotal Ages For Your Brain
The brain goes through five distinct phases in life, with key turning points at ages nine, 32, 66 and 83, scientists have revealed. From a report: Around 4,000 people up to the age of 90 had scans to reveal the connections between their brain cells. Researchers at the University of Cambridge showed that the brain stays … ⌘ Read more

Former ANU vice-chancellor Genevieve Bell paid more than $400,000 in severance
Former ANU vice-chancellor Genevieve Bell received a severance package of more than $400,000 after resigning in September. ⌘ Read more

Analyzing 47,000 ChatGPT Conversations Shows Echo Chambers, Sensitive Data - and Unpredictable Medical Advice
For nearly three years OpenAI has touted ChatGPT as a “revolutionary” (and work-transforming) productivity tool, reports the Washington Post.

But after analyzing 47,000 ChatGPT conversations, the Post found that users “are overwhelmingly turning to the chatbot for … ⌘ Read more