Linkage

Those who refuse to have their bags checked can be fired, according to the Coles policy which was updated last year but only recently routinely enforced, according to worker representatives. It replaces a previous practice whereby staff bag inspections were only used after a genuine suspicion of theft.

“The reason they’re bag checking is because they know that their own workers are forced to think about stealing because they can’t afford food,” the secretary of the Retail and Fast Food Workers Union (Raffwu), Josh Cullinan, said.

“We have these ridiculous situations where workers may have their sanitary items and prescription medication, and they have to show it to their manager.”

A Coles spokesperson said bag check policies were standard across the retail industry.

“While the policy was paused for a short time, it has been at Coles for many years,” the spokesperson said.

Coles and rival Woolworths have enjoyed a period of bumper returns after raising grocery prices at a faster pace than inflation, leading to increased profit margins during a period of financial strain for many households.

The evidence – from Israeli meda reports and eyewitnesses, as well as a host of visual clues from the crime scene itself – tell a far more complex story than the one presented nightly on the BBC.

Did the Israeli military fire into the Hamas-controlled civilian homes in the same fashion as it had fired into its own military bases, and with the same disregard for the safety of Israelis inside? Was the goal in each case to prevent at all costs Hamas taking hostages whose release would require a very high price from Israel?

Kibbutz Be’eri has been a favoured destination for BBC reporters keen to illustrate Hamas’ barbarity. It is where Lucy Williamson headed again this week. And yet none of her reporting highlighted comments made to the Israeli Haaretz newspaper by Tuval Escapa, the kibbutz’s security coordinator. He said Israeli military commanders had ordered the “shelling [of] houses on their occupants in order to eliminate the terrorists along with the hostages”.

That echoed the testimony of Yasmin Porat, who sought shelter in Be’eri from the nearby Nova music festival. She told Israeli Radio that once Israeli special forces arrived: “They eliminated everyone, including the hostages because there was very, very heavy crossfire.”

In short, it does not look anything like the panic you might expect if the odds of the world entering into war were edging higher. The brightest conclusion is that such odds really are close to zero. A darker one is that, like the investors of 1914, today’s may soon be blindsided. History points to a third possibility: that even if investors expect a major war, there is little they can do to reliably profit from it.

The easiest way to understand this is to imagine yourself in 1914, knowing that the first world war was about to arrive. You would need to place your bets quickly—within weeks, the main exchanges in London, New York and continental Europe would be closed. They would stay that way for months. Would you be able to guess how many, and which way the war might have turned by then? If you wisely judged American stocks to be a good bet, would you have managed to trade with a broker who avoided bankruptcy amid a liquidity crisis? You might have decided, again wisely, to trim positions in soon-to-be war-strained government debt. Would you have guessed that Russian bonds, which would experience a communist revolution and Bolshevik-driven default, were the ones to dump completely?

The list of recipients includes party leader Keir Starmer, his deputy Angela Rayner, shadow foreign secretary David Lammy, and even the former vice-chair of Labour Friends of Palestine, Lisa Nandy, who is now shadow international development minister.

These donations were provided by Labour Friends of Israel (LFI), a pro-Israel lobby group which takes MPs on “fact-finding” missions to the region, and Sir Trevor Chinn, a multi-millionaire business tycoon and long-time pro-Israel lobbyist.

More than half of Starmer’s shadow cabinet are listed as parliamentary supporters or officers of LFI.

Amid the flurry of misinformation and misleading online content about the Israel-Hamas war that’s circulating on social media, these images, too, are being used without disclosure of whether they are real or not.

A handful of small online news outlets, blogs and newsletters have featured “Conflict between Israel and Palestine generative AI” without marking it as the product of generative AI. It’s not clear whether these publications are aware it is a fake image.

The course has long been in the crosshairs of the Sydney lord mayor, Clover Moore, and also the former NSW premier Bob Carr, who argued it occupied prime land in the city centre that could be used by a wider range of people.

A discussion paper will be released year early next as part of a consultation process about the future of the course, but the government’s preferred option is for the new park to be established on the western boundary and part of the section north of Dacey Avenue, which it says will maximise access for residents of Green Square, Zetland and Waterloo.

The government said the Green Square urban renewal area had 33,000 residents and was expected to become one of the most densely populated areas in Australia, with 80,000 people living within 2km of Moore Park by 2040.

Rents have rocketed and property prices are hot, but the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) has changed the way it looks at the market and a key analysis panel that examines housing issues has not met for more than a year.

The Housing Market Discussion Group brought together internal experts to share insights on household budgets, the lending markets and the stability of our financial system.

It hasn't met since September 8 2022.

Documents sought through the Freedom of Information (FOI) process reveal the most recent meeting of the group — also known as the Domestic Housing Community Meeting — was one day after the central bank hiked interest rates for a fifth time.

Australia appears to be on the cusp of an eighth COVID-19 wave, with an increase in cases across the country. 

Victoria's acting chief health officer has suggested all Melburnians consider donning masks again as community transmission surges, while NSW chief health officer Kerry Chant says case numbers will likely rise in the lead-up to Christmas.

Her firm’s research, she argued, showed it was clear that it was not the highest skyscraper-dominated areas nor sprawling, car-dependent greenfield developments where people were most content but somewhere in between; neighbourhoods with multiple local centres, parks, green streets and a mix of apartment buildings from three to 12 storeys, terraces, townhouses and some larger stand-alone homes, too.

“Everything they’re asking for us is all good stuff – there’s nothing crazy. We want green, walkable, compact and well-maintained neighbourhoods,” she said.

The complaint, filed earlier today by Attorney General Brian Schwalb, focuses on the multifamily landlords' use of software from Texas-based firm RealPage, which suggests rental prices based on a pricing algorithm. Key to those models, according to the suit, is the data fed in from the landlords and the pressure RealPage puts on them to stick to the code-derived rental rates.

"RealPage and the defendant landlords illegally colluded to artificially raise rents by participating in a centralized, anticompetitive scheme, causing District residents to pay millions of dollars above fair market prices,” Schwalb said in a release tied to the complaint.