TRANSCRIPT
- Lawsuit challenges Trump order allowing immigration raids at religious sites.
- Communities in Australia begin Lunar New Year celebrations.
- And in cricket, Australia prepares for a Test series with Sri Lanka.
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In the United States, Quaker groups have sued the Trump administration over a policy allowing federal officials to arrest undocumented immigrants at sensitive sites such as places of worship.
Last week, Trump administration officials changed a policy preventing Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents from raiding religious sites, playgrounds, schools and hospitals without approval from supervisors.
Now, documents filed in a federal district court in Maryland alleges the policy denies the US guarantee of religious liberty, saying "the very threat of that immigration enforcement deters congregants from attending services, especially members of immigrant communities."
Former ICE director PJ Lechleitner says he doesn't believe there will be a significant amount of raids at houses of worship.
"New adminstration comes in and changes that policy. And has removed those restrictions. I don’t think you’re going to be seeing a lot of target operations in churches or places of worship or schools or whatever. Unless there’s a real operational and public safety, national security, need to do so."
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Communities in Australia are joining millions across Asia in celebrating the Lunar New Year.
The 15-day celebration takes place during the first new moon of the lunar calendar.
2025 is the Year of the Snake in the Chinese zodiac - and there are differences depending on the country or region.
Many East Asian and Southeast Asian countries - and diaspora around the world - mark the occasion with family celebrations, ceremonies honouring ancestors, the giving of red envelopes to family members containing small amounts of money; and fireworks.
Dil Tamang is one of the founding members of the Tamang Society of Sydney - NSW.
He told SBS Nepali, Buddhist communities in Nepal, India, Bhutan and Tibet celebrate the lunar new year, which they call Lhosar, in their own way.
"Tika is a blessings to younger people. When you pass blessings you put something on your forehead, which is made out of rice. After taking blessings grom the elders, we just gather together to have some delicious food. Typically, the Tamang community has their own typical traditional food also. We avoid eating meat."
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Chinese startup DeepSeek says it suffered outages on its website after its breakthrough AI assistant became the top-rated free application available on Apple's App Store in the United States.
The company says it has since resolved the issues, which were related to its application programming interface and users' inability to log in to the website.
Tech stocks plummeted in the United States, Japan and the Netherlands, with investors concerned about the emergence of the low-cost Chinese artificial intelligence that looks to threaten the dominance of current A-I leaders like OpenAI and Nvidia.
Annex Wealth Management chief economist, Brian Jacobsen says the developments show smaller companies might be able to break the dominance of the big players.
"They don't necessarily have the tens of billions of dollars that some of these companies in the US have, and they wanted to compete. They had perhaps a better algorithm, a better idea about how to train the models, and then also how to execute on it for answering people's questions. They were able to really do this on what some people would call a shoestring budget."
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Wild storms and a sweltering heatwave are keeping emergency services and power providers in different parts of Australia busy.
Scorching conditions that swept across Australia during the long weekend have moved from South Australia and Victoria to New South Wales, with much of the state - including Sydney - expecting temperatures in the high 30s or low 40s.
But a cool change expected in the afternoon will bring the risk of severe thunderstorms, including large hail and damaging winds.
Meanwhile, residents in Dimboola and Wail - in Victoria’s northwest - have been told to take shelter now, as a fire sparked by dry lightning expands in size to 63,000 hectares.
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In cricket, Australia's vice-captain Travis Head says the team is considering batting order changes ahead of the Test tour of Sri Lanka.
The two-Test series gets underway tomorrow at Galle International Stadium.
The Warne-Muralitharan Trophy has been in Australia’s possession since 2019, but the visitors will be eager to break a 14-year drought and secure their first Test series triumph in Sri Lanka since 2011.
Travis Head says different strategies need to be adopted to put the team in a winning position.
"There has been some conversation around it because the team has been together for a long period of time. And especially in these conditions, I think you need to be brave. You need to make some big calls. A batting change may or may not work but we're open to it as a team."
