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

780,000 Windows Users Downloaded Linux Distro Zorin OS in the Last 5 Weeks
In October Zorin OS claimed it had 100,000 downloads in a little over two days in the days following Microsoft’s end of support for Windows 10.

And one month later, Zorin OS developers now claim that 780,000 people downloaded it from a Windows computer in the space of a month, according to the tech news site XDA Developers.

… ⌘ Read more

Court Ends Dragnet Electricity Surveillance Program in Sacramento
A California judge has shut down a decade-long surveillance program in which Sacramento’s utility provider shared granular smart-meter data on 650,000 residents with police to hunt for cannabis grows. The EFF reports: The Sacramento County Superior Court ruled that the surveillance program run by the Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) … ⌘ Read more

Amazon Cut Thousands of Engineers in Its Record Layoffs, Despite Saying It Needs To Innovate Faster
Amazon’s 14,000-plus layoffs announced last month touched almost every piece of the company’s sprawling business, from cloud computing and devices to advertising, retail and grocery stores. But one job category bore the brunt of cuts more than others: engineers. CNBC: Documents filed … ⌘ Read more

Astronomers may have glimpsed evidence of the biggest stars ever seen
The distant universe might be littered with supermassive stars between 1000 and 10,000 times the mass of the sun, which could solve a cosmic mystery about the origins of extremely large black holes ⌘ Read more

Fired Techie Admits Sabotaging Ex-Employer, Causing $862K In Damage
An Ohio IT contractor pleaded guilty to breaking into his former employer’s network after being fired, impersonating another worker and using a PowerShell script to reset 2,500 passwords – an act that locked out thousands of employees and caused more than $862,000 in damage. He faces up to 10 years in prison. The Register reports: Maxwell Schu … ⌘ Read more

Nvidia Brings Ad-free Cloud Gaming To New Chromebooks
Nvidia and Google announced today a new cloud gaming plan called GeForce Now Fast Pass that is exclusive to Chromebooks. Anyone who purchases a new Chromebook will receive a year of the service included with their device at no additional charge. Fast Pass allows Chromebook owners to stream more than 2,000 games from their existing Steam, Epic or Xbox libraries.

The … ⌘ Read more

Verizon Cutting More Than 13,000 Jobs As It Restructures
An anonymous reader writes: U.S. wireless carrier Verizon said Thursday it will cut more than 13,000 jobs in its largest single layoff as it works to shrink costs and restructure operations. Verizon also said it plans to convert 179 corporate-owned retail stores into franchised operations and close one store.

Verizon’s new CEO, Dan Schulman, said in a note to employe … ⌘ Read more

More Than 60 US and Canadian Police Units Now Use Boston Dynamics’ Robot Dog
Boston Dynamics’ Spot robot is now deployed by more than 60 bomb squads and SWAT teams across the US and Canada. The 75-pound four-legged machine starts at around $100,000 and has been used in armed standoffs, hostage rescues and hazardous materials incidents since its commercial debut five years ago. The Massachusetts … ⌘ Read more

An AI Podcasting Machine Is Churning Out 3,000 Episodes a Week
fjo3 shares a report from TheWrap: There are already at least 175,000 AI-generated podcast episodes on platforms like Spotify and Apple. That’s thanks to Inception Point AI, a startup with just eight employees cranking out 3,000 episodes a week covering everything from localized weather reports and pollen trackers to a detailed account of Charlie Kirk’s as … ⌘ Read more

Ancient figurine may show sexual encounter between woman and goose
A 12,000-year-old clay sculpture found in Israel depicts a goose on the back of a woman, and archaeologists suggest it may be a depiction of an animistic mythological scene ⌘ Read more

Cybercriminals unleash fake Centrelink scam on vulnerable Australians
More than 270,000 malicious emails impersonating Services Australia and Centrelink have flooded Australian inboxes. ⌘ Read more

Security Researchers Spot 150,000 Function-less npm Packages in Automated ‘Token Farming’ Scheme
An anonymous reader shared this report from The Register:

Yet another supply chain attack has hit the npm registry in what Amazon describes as “one of the largest package flooding incidents in open source registry history” — but with a twist. Instead of injecting credential-steal … ⌘ Read more