CANBERRA, Australia — The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) has appealed to the coalition government for special funding tied to local and outer-suburban news to be made permanent. The enhanced news-gathering initiative is set to run out next financial year after AU$14.8 million ($11.4 million) has been allocated to the program. Last month’s budget forecasts an end to the indexation freeze, which has ripped AU$84 million from the ABC’s coffers. But if the scheme, which started under the Kevin Rudd government in 2013, is scrapped, the national broadcast still faces a funding shortfall of more than AU$10 million ($7.7 million) in 2022/23. ABC managing director David…
Author: zenger.news
MELBOURNE, Australia — As Australia’s politicians continue to bicker over whether there should be more purpose-built quarantine facilities around the country, a key business group is more interested in an immediate exit strategy from Victoria’s lockdown. Australian Industry Group says the latest 14-day lockdown appears increasingly unnecessary and is causing needless economic, mental health, and health damage. “There appears to be no justification for keeping an entire city of five million people in a prolonged lockdown for a handful of connected cases each day,” Innes Willox, chief executive of Australian Industry Group, said. “This lockdown has been marked by exaggerated language, and…
BRISBANE, Australia — Australian pharmacists believe the national vaccine rollout could be finished months faster if more are allowed to take part. The Pharmacy Guild of Australia expects the rollout to take another 408 days without their involvement. But that could be slashed to 241 days if thousands of pharmacies already classified as suitable to deliver the vaccines were included. “It’s just beyond belief we are not using the thousands of pharmacies at our disposal to get millions of vaccines out of fridges and into people’s arms,” guild president Trent Twomey said. People line up to receive a coronavirus vaccination. (Dan Peled/AAP Image)“It’s not…
A pharmacist from a small Central Asian country has become a social-media star by performing stunts, such as splitting a cucumber and a falling frankfurter with playing cards and piercing two swinging bottles with a single arrow. Nuriddin Karimov, of Tajikistan, shares videos of his trick shots on TikTok and Instagram under the name Cardist World. In the first video, Karimov shows a pack of ordinary playing cards to the camera in front of an upright cucumber. He then tosses one card at the cucumber, splits it in half, and takes a chunk to eat. In the second clip, he…
CANBERRA, Australia — Australians and businesses that keep a keen eye on developments in the economy will have had a lot to mull over in the past week. The national accounts showed the economy not only grew at a solid 1.8 percent in the first three months of the year, but at an annual growth rate of 1.1 percent, it means the nation has fully recovered from last year’s recession. House prices also continued to grow at a rapid pace across the country, and nationwide are now over 10 percent higher than a year earlier. However, such positives were countered by…
TOWNSVILLE, Australia — The opposition in Queensland, the north-eastern Australian state, slammed the trial of GPS trackers for youth offenders after poor service coverage put the program in doubt. The state government passed laws in April to allow courts to fit repeat offenders aged 16 and 17 with GPS trackers and deny them the presumption of bail if they commit a crime whilst on bail. Under the laws, teens must be charged with a serious offense and must have previously been convicted of a serious offense to be fitted for GPS trackers. The trial is underway in the cities of…
SYDNEY — A former Catholic priest from Australia who traveled to poor Asian countries to sexually exploit vulnerable boys was jailed for at least 14 years. “He is one of the base individuals who created abhorrent products for his sexual pleasure, using children made vulnerable by circumstances in their homeland,” said Judge James Bennett. Peter Andrew Hansen, 63, pleaded guilty in the New South Wales District Court in Sydney, one of Australia’s largest cities, to 31 charges. They include producing child pornography in Vietnam and the Philippines, distributing child exploitation material, and engaging in sexual activity with nine boys. The former Melbourne priest, Labor…
MELBOURNE, Australia — Authorities in Australia are combing through virus samples and genomic sequencing data from across the country to determine how a family in Victoria, a south-eastern state in Australia, contracted the Delta coronavirus strain. Victoria’s latest outbreak, for which the city of Melbourne is now in its second week of strict lockdown, rose by four cases, three of which are linked to a household in the city’s west. Amid fears that the variant that has caused devastation in India and the UK could be spreading through the community, health authorities are re-examining strains in quarantine and cases linked to…
GULU, Uganda — Richard Kidega, a farmer in Lakalanganya village in Pader district, northern Uganda, has been cutting down endangered indigenous trees, despite government warnings. “I have been cutting down trees for charcoal, which I sell to provide necessities for my family — for instance, paying for medical care and school fees for my children,” he told Zenger News. Thick covers of indigenous tree species in the Acholi region of Uganda have dramatically diminished owing to rampant illegal logging for commercial charcoal production done by people like Kidega. Afzelia Africana (also known as African mahogany), and Shea nut, locally known as beyo and…
GABORONE, Botswana — Kenson Kgaga, the owner of Naga Safaris that offers day trips to Okavango Delta in northern Botswana, was hopeful of making a total return to business when he got several tourists bookings from abroad. But his hopes have been dashed. “We had four cancelations which were attributed to the ‘State of Emergency’,” he told Zenger News. His clients had been postponing travel to Botswana, hoping that the State of Emergency declared by President Mokgweetsi Eric Keabetswe Masisi in April 2020 to curb the spread of Covid-19 will be lifted. “They said they were canceling because insurance companies are…