TRANSCRIPT
Eleven people are now confirmed dead in Los Angeles with the death toll in major wildfires expected to grow when conditions allow for house-to-house searches.
Around 180,000 people have evacuated from their homes as six fires continue burning throughout the second-largest city in the United States.
Firefighters have reportedly gained control over two blazes, with easing winds offering an opportunity to tackle the flames.
With reports of fire hydrants running out of water, questions are now being raised about water management in the city.
Water equity and adaptation specialist Edith De Guzman from the University of California says the demand is too overwhelming for the systems in place.
"Well, the reality is that we have urban water systems that are not designed to fight wildfires or put out entire sort of mountainsides that are on fire. And we are having, you know, very high severity events that are unprecedented. And so, unfortunately, urban systems are just not fully equipped or have traditionally been expected to be equipped to fight this magnitude of wildfire.”
***
The U-S Supreme Court appears likely to uphold laws that will see popular social media platform TikTok banned in the U-S.
The laws will see the app banned, unless it's Chinese parent company ByteDance, agrees to sell to a U-S company.
The U-S government says it fears Chinese authorities have the power to force the company to hand over the data of around 170 million American users, as well as use minisformation to influence it's users.
Jeffrey Fisher is a lawyer representing TikTok.
He says the laws go against the U-S constitution.
"When the government's reason for interfering is, we don't like the viewpoint or the content that's going to be expressed through that platform, that is the core First Amendment value that our framers enshrined in the very first Amendment in our Constitution, to protect freedom of thought, freedom of expression, freedom to create, freedom to share, and freedom to learn."
***
A man has died after being stabbed at a park in Melbourne late on Friday evening.
Police say they were called to reports of a group of men fighting in a park in the city's west at around 11:30pm on Friday [[10/01]].
A 24-year-old was found with a stab wound and received medical treatment before dying at the scene.
Two 27-year-old men were also taken to hospital with non-life threatening injuries.
Detective Inspector Paul Lloyd of Victoria Police says the attacks appear targeted, reporting that around a dozen men in four cars pulled up to the park where seven other men were gathered.
"The altercation went for about five minutes during which edged weapons were produced and used on several people who were who were originally here not long after, after about five minutes of vehicles, basically took off north along the street here."
Four men have been arrested over the stabbings.
***
Police in New South Wales are investigating antisemitic graffiti on both a home and a synagogue in Sydney overnight.
The vandalism is the second such targeting in recent days, with Nazi swastikas painted across a synagogue in the southern Sydney suburb of Allawah just days earlier.
New South Wales Premier Chris Minns has released a statement condemning what he called monstrous and appalling actions.
Mr Minns also says his government will extend a one-off grant of $340,000 to the New South Wales Jewish Board of Deputies to enhance security measures for the Jewish community.
This member of the Jewish community says it's distressing to see Nazi symbolism used to intimidate the community.
"It's a pretty old, tried and tested scapegoat, and it's kind of sad that it's once again, here and ready for people to use. I don't know my message would be, it's like, actually educate yourself. Like, this is a combination, I think of some degree of like ignorance and mental illness. And both of those things can actually be addressed but they need to be addressed from the top down."
***
More than 200 senior psychiatrists in public hospitals in New South Wales are set to resign by the end of January, citing patient safety concerns and poor pay conditions.
A total of 201, out of the 260, senior psychiatrists in the New South Wales public health system are resigning, sparking concerns of similar action across the healthcare sector.
Psychiatrists in the state are paid around 30 per cent less than their counterparts in Victoria and Queensland and are requesting a 25 per cent pay increase.
New South Wales Health Minister Ryan Park is urging the mental health specialists to take back their resignations.
"There will be impacts on our emergency departments, there will be impacts on our surgical wards, there will be impacts on our forensic hospitals, there will be impacts on pediatrics, mental health services are not just isolated in nature. They're part of an integrated network of healthcare that we provide."
***
Australia's Sam Goodman's world title dream is spoiled after an eye injury has forced him to withdraw from an already rescheduled fight with Naoya Inoue in Japan.
Goodman picked up a cut at training four weeks ago, forcing him to reschedule his Christmas eve fight.
Now, Goodman has suffered another setback, with a recurring eye injury and subsequent stitches forcing him to withdraw from the fight.
