This was published 3 months ago
Human remains have been found on a beach on the NSW Mid North Coast, after the search for a missing teenager was suspended.
Emergency services were called to Little Bay Beach at Arakoon about 7.30am on Friday after a member of the public found remains, which have since been taken for forensic examination.
Former King’s School student Astin Gerstl, 18, went missing from the same beach on Sunday. Authorities and volunteers searched for him for several days but he was unable to be located.
Former CFMEU boss John Setka is facing more charges after he was accused of harassing the union’s government-appointed administrator.
Setka was charged on November 12 with seven counts of using a carriage service to menace, harass and offend the union’s government-appointed administrator, Mark Irving, KC.
Police revealed on Friday they had hit Setka with a further two counts of using a telecommunications device to offend, as part of the investigation.
“Investigators will allege the Footscray man sent the offensive messages on October 30 to an investigator appointed by the CFMEU administration,” police said.
Setka was granted bail to appear at the Melbourne Magistrates’ Court on January 30.
The charges relate to extremely aggressive and profanity-laced messages Setka allegedly sent the CFMEU administration, led by Irving.
Setka has over the past six months sent a number of allegedly threatening messages to administration officials. In his messages, he has repeatedly attacked this masthead’s investigative journalist Nick McKenzie and anti-corruption buster Geoffrey Watson, SC.
He accused both men of being “dogs” for exposing union wrongdoing and made highly offensive remarks about Watson’s and McKenzie’s family members.
In one message, Watson was allegedly attacked for having “gone on 60 Minutes along with that scumbag Nick McKenzie”. “I warn you Watson, you should hope you never cross my path,” he added.
In October 2024, this masthead revealed police had warned Irving that he was the subject of an imminent death threat designed to undermine his efforts to clean up the union.
There is no suggestion Setka was involved in that threat. A spokesperson for the administrator said at the time that Irving “will not be distracted or diverted” from his work.
Setka quit as the construction union’s boss in 2024 after facing numerous allegations of misconduct tied to his activities within the CFMEU. He was elected to lead the Victorian branch in 2012.
The allegations, revealed in this masthead’s Building Bad investigation last year, prompted the federal government to appoint Irving as an independent administrator to overhaul the union.
Police have released new photos of their hunt for accused double murderer Dezi Freeman, as specialised cadaver dogs from NSW are brought in to help searchers.
Victoria Police’s Taskforce Summit has for weeks been combing bushland surrounding Mount Buffalo in the state’s north-east, but there has been no sign of Freeman in the thick bushland and heavy terrain.
The past week’s search effort has focused on a dense area covering about 880 square metres. Police have cleared caves and conducted line searches. Two cadaver dogs from the NSW police force were brought in to aid the search.
“The area was previously searched on 12 September with the purpose of locating an active armed offender. However, on this occasion, search teams were focused on identifying and locating evidence or the body of Freeman,” Victoria Police said in a statement.
Police are offering a $1 million reward for information leading to Freeman or his body, after he allegedly murdered Detective Leading Senior Constable Neal Thompson and Senior Constable Vadim De Waart-Hottart on August 26 at Porepunkah, before fleeing into the bush at the base of Mount Buffalo with the officers’ revolvers.
Officers were last month testing firearms after a single gunshot was heard about 20 minutes after Freeman’s deadly ambush.
Police have previously said Freeman might be dead as a result of self-harm.
During a press conference last month, Chief Commissioner Mike Bush said police were still investigating whether he could still be in the Porepunkah area, but that was a low likelihood given police searches. “The other two main assumptions are that he is already deceased in the location, or he is being looked after elsewhere,” Bush said on November 17.
The photos and vision police released today show officers climbing through bushland, crossing a river and walking with dogs.
That’s all we’ve got time for folks - thanks for reading, and have a great weekend.
Moderate Liberal Andrew Bragg, who defied Peter Dutton to support the Voice to parliament, will reignite a culture war when he calls for a major change to acknowledgments of Country to also include Australia’s British and migrant history.
Bragg will draw on Indigenous intellectual Noel Pearson’s notion of Australia’s “three stories” – Indigenous, British and postwar migrant – to argue for the change during a speech on Monday to the conservative Centre for Independent Studies. He will also criticise Labor for failing to move on from the Voice to parliament referendum defeat.
“Sometimes a welcome or an acknowledgment occurs without the national anthem or any other words, and so we only hear part of the rich Australian story,” Bragg will say, according to a draft of his speech.
“I worry we have lost a love of our country, and this loss means trouble ahead for Australia. We need more to coalesce around. We need to do more to bring Australians together.”
Carlton have cut former AFLW captain Kerryn Peterson months after she gave birth to her first child, leaving her with a decision on whether to attempt to continue her career.
Peterson, 33, was moved to Carlton’s inactive list for the 2025 season in February after announcing her pregnancy.
She had her son Max in August and relinquished the captaincy to Abbie McKay before sitting out the season.
Peterson had been expected to continue her career next season but has not been offered a contract with Carlton, where she had played 64 games since 2017, including six consecutive seasons without missing a game.
Human remains have been found on a beach on the NSW Mid North Coast, after the search for a missing teenager was suspended.
Emergency services were called to Little Bay Beach at Arakoon about 7.30am on Friday after a member of the public found remains, which have since been taken for forensic examination.
Former King’s School student Astin Gerstl, 18, went missing from the same beach on Sunday. Authorities and volunteers searched for him for several days but he was unable to be located.
Heatwaves could grip large parts of the country from the Pilbara to Sydney this weekend, while hot, dry and windy conditions are fuelling extreme fire danger in south-eastern Australia.
At the start of what is forecast to be a hot, dry summer, despite the declaration of a La Niña, the Bureau of Meteorology has issued warnings of low-severity heatwaves in NSW, Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia and the Northern Territory.
Minimum and maximum temperatures must remain unusually high for at least three days before the bureau formally declares a heatwave.
Extreme conditions are forecast in the Pilbara region in Western Australia on Sunday, when the region is set to hit the high 30s to the mid-40s.
Sydney reached 29.4 degrees on Thursday at Observatory Hill, before soaring to 37.3 degrees on Friday. The forecast on Saturday is for 37 degrees, before a cool change in the evening.
December 10 – or last week, depending on which tech giant you ask – is D-Day for the anxious generation.
Google’s YouTube, Meta’s Facebook, Instagram and Threads, Kick, Reddit, Snapchat, TikTok, Twitch and X (formerly Twitter) are subject to the social media ban for under-16s.
Meta’s Messenger and WhatsApp are not on the list of age-restricted platforms (controversially, neither is Discord nor Roblox, though the latter has started rolling out some new age assurance features after widespread criticism).
Some social media platforms, such as Instagram, have been kicking off users they believe to be under the age of 16 since late November. Others, such as TikTok and YouTube, have confirmed only this week how they intend to comply with the eSafety Commissioner’s new minimum age requirement.
Washington: United States lawmakers who watched classified footage of strikes on an alleged Venezuelan drug boat have emerged with different interpretations of what occurred, but accept that War Secretary Pete Hegseth did not issue an order to “kill everybody” on the vessel.
The admiral in charge of the operation, Frank Bradley, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Dan Caine, briefed lawmakers on Thursday (Friday AEDT) amid serious concerns in Congress and among legal experts that the US had committed a war crime by firing upon survivors of the initial strike.
It followed a report in The Washington Post alleging that Hegseth had instructed the admiral to “kill everybody” on board – a claim he strongly denied.
Democrats and Republicans said they accepted Caine and Bradley’s evidence that no such order was given. However, they differed on their interpretations of the footage.
Read the full story from our US-based foreign correspondent here.
Former CFMEU boss John Setka is facing more charges after he was accused of harassing the union’s government-appointed administrator.
Setka was charged on November 12 with seven counts of using a carriage service to menace, harass and offend the union’s government-appointed administrator, Mark Irving, KC.
Police revealed on Friday they had hit Setka with a further two counts of using a telecommunications device to offend, as part of the investigation.
“Investigators will allege the Footscray man sent the offensive messages on October 30 to an investigator appointed by the CFMEU administration,” police said.
Setka was granted bail to appear at the Melbourne Magistrates’ Court on January 30.
The charges relate to extremely aggressive and profanity-laced messages Setka allegedly sent the CFMEU administration, led by Irving.
Setka has over the past six months sent a number of allegedly threatening messages to administration officials. In his messages, he has repeatedly attacked this masthead’s investigative journalist Nick McKenzie and anti-corruption buster Geoffrey Watson, SC.
He accused both men of being “dogs” for exposing union wrongdoing and made highly offensive remarks about Watson’s and McKenzie’s family members.
In one message, Watson was allegedly attacked for having “gone on 60 Minutes along with that scumbag Nick McKenzie”. “I warn you Watson, you should hope you never cross my path,” he added.
In October 2024, this masthead revealed police had warned Irving that he was the subject of an imminent death threat designed to undermine his efforts to clean up the union.
There is no suggestion Setka was involved in that threat. A spokesperson for the administrator said at the time that Irving “will not be distracted or diverted” from his work.
Setka quit as the construction union’s boss in 2024 after facing numerous allegations of misconduct tied to his activities within the CFMEU. He was elected to lead the Victorian branch in 2012.
The allegations, revealed in this masthead’s Building Bad investigation last year, prompted the federal government to appoint Irving as an independent administrator to overhaul the union.
Former federal opposition leader Peter Dutton is offloading from his expansive property portfolio, listing his luxury family farm on the outskirts of Brisbane for sale.
The property, called Juffs Farm, is in Dayboro, about an hour’s drive from Brisbane’s CBD, and is on 169 acres.
It features an original Queenslander with original timber floors, but has been renovated into a six-bedroom, four-bathroom home since being bought by the Dutton family for $2.1 million in 2020.
It will go to auction next Friday.
Our Ashes blog has just gone live. England will resume at 9/325 on the second day and the first ball will be at 3pm AEDT.
Tom Decent has a great piece here on the first day’s play, in which English great Joe Root finally got his maiden Australian Test century (and Mitch Starc took 6/71):
Though he had compiled 13,551 runs before this match – the second most in Test history – arriving at the Gabba on Thursday with no centuries in an away Ashes series remained a point of ridicule for Root among Australian fans, who have been quick to remind the 34-year-old he “can’t do it here”.
At 8.38pm Brisbane time, with England doing it relatively easy at 7-252 in their best batting display of the series, Root ticked off his 999th, 1000th, 1001st and 1002nd Test runs in Australia with a glance down to fine leg for four to tick off a personal milestone that had been on everyone’s lips this summer.
Matthew Hayden jokingly threatened to run naked across the MCG if Root didn’t reach three figures this summer. For the good of everyone, that is now officially off the table. Hayden was seen celebrating at the back of the Gabba commentary booth.