Australia news as it happened: Albanese shirks responsibility for parliamentary expenses saga; Health minister meeting state counterparts over funding as ‘bed-block crisis’ plagues hospitals and aged care

Thanks for reading the national news blog. This is where we’ll end today’s coverage. We will be back next week with more coverage.

To conclude, here’s a look back at the day’s major stories:

• Brittany Higgins has officially been declared bankrupt following her defamation loss to her former boss, ex-Liberal senator Linda Reynolds. The Federal Court ruled Higgins’ finances should be taken over so Reynolds can recover the money she is owed.
• Anthony Albanese has declared the government has secured a deal with the owners of the Tomago aluminium smelter to prevent the shutdown of the plant.
• A Melbourne memorial to police officers killed in the line of duty was vandalised with red paint and offensive slogans this morning.
• US-based platform Reddit has filed a challenge in Australia’s High Court seeking to overturn the nation’s world-first social media ban for under-16s, arguing that the law infringes on free political speech and poses serious privacy risk. The government said the legal action came as “no surprise”.
• The government announced a review of its controversial electric car discount, which spares buyers the cost of fringe benefits tax when they pay for a car lease through pre-tax salary deduction.
• And overseas, Thailand’s prime minister, Anutin Charnvirakul, has received royal permission to dissolve parliament, setting up general elections early next year.

Thanks again for joining us. This is Isabel McMillan signing off.

Japan has lifted a tsunami advisory issued after an earthquake with a magnitude of 6.9 hit the country’s north-eastern region on Friday.

The Japan Meteorological Agency earlier put the earthquake’s preliminary magnitude at 6.7.

The quake struck at 11.44am (1.44pm AEDT) off the coast of Aomori prefecture with a depth of 20 kilometres, after a 7.5-magnitude earthquake hit the same region late on Monday.

Myanmar’s military killed at least 33 people, including patients and health workers, in what could be the deadliest airstrike on a hospital in almost five years of civil war, according to health and medical agencies.

More than 70 people are believed to have been injured in the same Wednesday-night attack in the township of Mrauk U, in the fiercely contested western state of Rakhine.

“The high number of casualties occurred because the hospital took a direct hit,” separatist Arakan Army spokesman Khine Thu Kha told Reuters. Images posted on social media, which could not be immediately verified, show the hospital complex destroyed.

Myanmar’s military junta has been fighting a disparate collection of armed groups for decades in some cases, but fighting broadened and intensified after February 2021, when the generals took power in a coup from the democratically elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi.

In its efforts to take back swaths of the country lost to resistance forces and crush other pockets of dissent, the military has been using Chinese, Russian and Belarusian weaponry to attack military and civilian targets, including hospitals.

Read the full story here.

An earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 6.7 hit Japan’s north-eastern region on Friday, prompting a tsunami advisory for waves up to a metre high from the Japan Meteorological Agency.

The quake struck at 11.44am (1.44pm AEDT) off the coast of Aomori prefecture with a depth of 20 kilometres, after a 7.5-magnitude earthquake hit the same region late on Monday.

After Monday’s earthquake, the government issued a special advisory warning residents across a wide area, from Hokkaido in the north to Chiba, east of Tokyo, to be on alert for an increased possibility of a powerful earthquake hitting again within a week.

Reuters