Officers were called to Merrylands, in western Sydney, overnight. Follow the today’s news live
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As we flagged earlier, the treasurer Jim Chalmers will today announce foreign investment changes, with approvals to be made quicker and greater scrutiny to be placed on potential risks.
You can read all the details on this from Peter Hannam below:
Right now, we treat investments from right around the world more or less the same. We want to streamline it for the less-risky investments so we can devote much more time and energy and resources to screening the sorts of investments that we’re seeing in critical industries – like critical minerals, critical infrastructure, critical data, and the like.
This is all about strengthening the foreign investment framework to make sure that investment is in the national interest. We want to maximise the right kind of investment, but we want to minimise risk and that’s what these changes I’ll announce today are all about.
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Breaking Waves: Ocean News
04/30/2024 - 16:00
04/30/2024 - 12:07
Joshua Alexander Heckathorn, 20, arrested and booked into jail for second-degree burglary, criminal trespass and criminal mischief
Nearly 200 programs to raise baby salmon in a controlled environment dot the rivers in Oregon, holding them before releasing them into the wild to live out their life cycle. Last week, a man broke into the Winchester Bay Salmon Trout Enhancement Program (Step) and poured bleach into a Chinook salmon tank, killing about 18,000 fish.
Authorities arrested 20-year-old Joshua Alexander Heckathorn, a resident of Gardiner, Oregon, on 23 April, a day after the chemicals were dumped into one of the hatchery rearing ponds. He told law enforcement officials he had visited a storage area the day before and picked up a bottle of bleach, according to a Facebook post by the Douglas county sheriff’s office. Heckathorn was arrested and booked into the Douglas county jail on Tuesday for second-degree burglary, criminal trespass and criminal mischief.
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04/30/2024 - 11:23
Campaigners say loss of £200m from active travel budget is illegal and resulted from Treasury pressure
Swingeing cuts to public spending on cycling and walking in England should be overturned as government expenditure was already insufficient to meet legally binding climate targets, the high court has been told.
Campaigners are challenging a decision in 2023 to cut more than £200m from the Department for Transport’s active travel budget for the following two years.
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04/30/2024 - 09:31
Banks may follow suit after UK weather-related claims on home insurance reach new high
Britain’s biggest building society has stopped granting mortgages on some properties where there is a high risk of flooding but said this affected only “a very limited number” of homes.
Nationwide’s head of property risk, Rob Stevens, said the lender used mapping technology to identify which homes were vulnerable to flooding, and it would decline to grant a mortgage to buy a property it deemed to be at high risk.
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04/30/2024 - 08:29
Gardeners’ World presenter Arit Anderson creating colourful display to encourage gardeners to move away from peat
A completely peat-free garden will be showcased at the Hampton Court Palace flower show so the public can “have a chat about peat-free gardening” and learn how to do it themselves.
Peat-free compost has been a divisive topic in the gardening world, with some gardeners arguing that it is not as good as the peaty stuff for growing plants.
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04/30/2024 - 08:25
Agency announces rule on methylene chloride, colorless liquid used for stripping paint, cleaning metal and decaffeinating coffee
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced on Tuesday that it will ban most uses of methylene chloride, a colorless liquid used for stripping paint, cleaning metal, and even decaffeinating coffee. The chemical has been linked to dozens of deaths and advocates have long called for its ban.
The new rule will require stronger worker safety protections from the harmful carcinogen for the remaining “critical” uses. All consumer use will be prohibited within a year, while most commercial and industrial use will be phased out within the next two years.
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04/30/2024 - 08:00
Internal documents revealed by committee show companies lobbied against climate laws they publicly claimed to support
Big oil has privately acknowledged its efforts to downplay the dangers of burning fossil fuels, US Democrats have found.
Major fossil-fuel firms have also pledged support for international climate efforts, but internally admit these efforts are incompatible with their own climate plans. And they have lobbied against climate laws and regulations they have publicly claimed to support, documents newly revealed by the committee show.
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04/30/2024 - 07:00
National Park Service will reintroduce bears to Washington’s North Cascades and won’t remove horses from North Dakota park
Wildlife advocates are celebrating “incredible” news for the preservation of threatened bears, and a herd of historically significant wild horses, in separate north-western and upper midwestern national parks.
In North Dakota, the National Parks Service (NPS) has dropped a plan that would have seen about 200 wild horses, descended from those belonging to Native American tribes who fought the 1876 Great Sioux war, rounded up and removed from Theodore Roosevelt national park.
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04/30/2024 - 06:42
The far right are on the march in Germany and the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany has become the most popular party in several states. Immigration and a sense of being economically left behind have been driving factors in the rise in popularity but the Green party and the federal government’s climate policies have also borne the brunt of public anger. The Guardian travelled to Görlitz, on the German border with Poland, to find out to what extent Germany’s green policies are fuelling the far right
• How climate policies are becoming focus for far-right attacks in Germany
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04/30/2024 - 06:00
The state’s last sugar processing mill closed because there’s just not enough water in the Rio Grande to share between the US and Mexico
Tudor Uhlhorn has been too busy auctioning off agricultural equipment to grieve the “death” of Texas’s last sugar mill.
“I’m as sad as anyone else,” said the chairman of the board of the Rio Grande Valley Sugar Growers cooperative, which owns the now-shuttered mill in Santa Rosa, a small town about 40 miles from Brownsville. “I just haven’t had a whole lot of time to mourn.”
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