TRANSCRIPT
Welcome to SBS News in Easy English, I'm Sam Dover.
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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 reversed a policy preventing Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents from raiding religious sites, playgrounds, schools and hospitals without approval from supervisors.
The new lawsuit, filed in a federal district court in the state of Maryland, claims the new policy denies the US guarantee of religious liberty.
The documents say "the very threat of that immigration enforcement deters congregants from attending services, especially members of immigrant communities."
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Meanwhile, 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.
Many East Asian and Southeast Asian communities mark the occasion with family celebrations, ceremonies honouring ancestors, the giving of red envelopes 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 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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Tech stocks have fallen dramatically in the United States, Japan and the Netherlands, after the emergence of a new low-cost Chinese artificial intelligence model that threatens the dominance of current AI leaders like OpenAI and Nvidia.
Annex Wealth Management chief economist, Brian Jacobsen says the AI assistant from Chinese startup DeepSeek shows that smaller companies can break the dominance of the big tech giants.
"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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In cricket, Australia's vice-captain Travis Head says the team is considering changing their batting order ahead of a Test tour of Sri Lanka.
The two-Test series gets underway tomorrow at Galle International Stadium.
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."
That is SBS News in Easy English, I'm Sam Dover.
