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New South Wales Police say more than 100 alleged drug dealers have been arrested in a statewide sting operation, with cars, cash and drugs seized.
Between November 22 and December 7, police arrested and charged 108 people as part of a strike force aiming to reveal dial-a-dealer schemes mostly related to cocaine.
Assistant Commissioner Peter McKenna says more than $20,000 worth of drugs were seized, including cocaine, MDMA, ketamine and ice.
"We are attacking drug supply at every level. If people think it's okay to be dealing drugs around the city on this style of operation, we will tell them that we will find you. We will come for you. We will arrest you and put you before the courts. So it's not insignificant the amount of drugs seized, some vehicle stops had anything up to 70 bags of cocaine in them. So it's not as if people are running around just selling one or two bags of cocaine for a small amount of money."
Unemployed Australians are struggling to find a job as entry-level opportunities dry up, leaving many reliant on income support for years.
That's according to a report from the Australian Council of Social Service which has examined people affected by unemployment.
It found half of those who have been on income support for more than a year have a health condition, the majority are women and almost a third are over the age of 55.
Economist Saul Eslake says the issue is, it's taking people longer to find jobs.
"The increase in the unemployment rate hasn't been because people in aggregate have been losing jobs as occurred, for example, during the recessions of the early 1980s, the early 1990s, and during the Covid Pandemic. Rather, it's occurred because new entrants to the labor force as migrants or graduates from the education system are taking longer to find jobs than they had been doing prior to 2022."
United States President-elect Donald Trump says on his first day in office he will pardon rioters involved in the January 6, 2021 Capitol attack.
Mr Trump has described the prosecutions of his supporters as corrupt and has not ruled out pardoning the more than 900 already pleaded guilty, including those accused of acting violently in the attack.
"Everybody on that committee. For what they did, honestly, they should go to jail. I’m going to look at everything. We’ll look at individual cases. But I’m going to be acting very quickly. First day, I'm looking first day. These people have been there — how long is it? Three, four years. They’ve been in there for years. And they’re in a filthy, disgusting place that shouldn’t even be allowed to be open."
Syrians around the world are celebrating in the streets after hearing the news that President Basher al-Assad has fled Syria.
Syrian opposition forces have now taken control of the capital of Damascus and declared the end of 13 years of civil war and decades of Assad rule.
It took less than two weeks for rebel groups led by Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham to bring an end to the regime that led the country through over a decade of civil war.
Sydney-based Syrian activist Rifai Tammas told SBS Arabict he Syrian people feel optimistic about the change.
