
Explosion in Sydney apartment blows out brick wall and damages adjoining units
Fire and Rescue NSW (FRNSW) responded to reports ust before 6.30am of the explosion at an apartment block in Lidcombe. There was an explosion in a unit on the second level of a three-story building that blew out a brick wall, damaged a car and caused damage to adjoining units in the structure, officials said.
Firefighters found one person they described as 'unconscious or semiconscious' who was rescued, treated by paramedics and taken to an area hospital for treatment.
'They tell me that they'll be ok,' FRNSW superintendent Adam Dewberry said.
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Dewberry said there were no other reported injuries at this stage, and all people inside the unit had been accounted for. But there was 'significant damage' to the building, he said.
'There are some pets left in the building,' he said.
'A number of … people will be displaced and will not be able to go back into their accommodation due to the damage to the structure.'
'We are not sure at this stage how this explosion has occurred,' Dewberry added. 'There is no fire.'
Specialist FRNSW experts on scene on Friday morning were monitoring the building's stability with lasers, and a recovery operation had commenced.
More details soon …
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Telegraph
13 minutes ago
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Political censors have cynically hijacked vital child protections
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'Companies have effectively been treating all users as if they're adults, leaving children potentially exposed to porn and other types of harmful content,' wrote Melanie Dawes, Ofcom's chief executive, in January. The UK is not an outlier in its desire to keep children safe, either. Texas and three other US states require age verification for adult material, and so will Australia. But critics of the law have warned of consequences for free expression from the start, and over-zealous interpretations quickly became apparent. X, previously Twitter, has already put material behind the age gate, with Benjamin Jones, director of case management at the Free Speech Union – of which I am a member – identifying a number of posts which were worryingly censored for unverified users. Some supported calls for single-sex spaces for women. One by Wuhan lab researcher Billy Bostickson (a pseudonym) fell foul too; it was part of a thread on the use of bamboo RNA in vaccines. Several posts in a thread discussing Richard the Lionheart were gated, which merely contained a reference to the crusades. Most troublingly, a post linking to a live stream of police arrests at a demonstration at a migrant hotel in Leeds was also taken down. All these bans appear to have been the work of an over-zealous algorithm. Some saw this coming. Baroness Claire Fox has written of her dismay at realising how outnumbered speech advocates were when she was in a room as the only free speech advocate, alongside dozens of groups all requesting some clause or addition. 'Only two of us [peers] consistently opposed the bill – myself and Lord Daniel Moylan. I was shocked that so many from the free speech camp of peers were silent,' Fox tells me. 'It became a Christmas tree bill with lots of other things put in it,' said Kemi Badenoch as she campaigned for the Conservative leadership last year. She also predicted 'it will go after people who aren't doing anything wrong'. That hasn't quite happened yet, but long overdue moves to enforce accountability on giant, transnational platforms, and better protect children unfortunately coincided with a renewed desire to control political speech. The good state must take an active role in removing inflammatory speech, the United Nations declared in its 2021 paper Our Common Agenda. It re-emphasised the point last year. William Perrin, one of the architects of Ofcom's approach to regulating online platforms, who was not involved in drafting the legislation, recently posted a paper for the think tank Demos called Epistemic Security 2029: Protecting the UK's information supply chains and strengthening discourse for the next political era. It explicitly calls for the policing of social media platforms. One gets the sense that as long as populists are rising, the impulse to censor will be irresistible to their political opponents. By controlling our discourse, they can control democracy. 'We have an establishment that is innately hostile to Free Speech,' Jones of the Free Speech Union tells me. There is very much wrong with this. Against a backdrop of widespread concern about street crime, shoplifting and rampant fraud, the energy devoted by police to what we say online is confounding, from enthusiasm for the category of 'non-crime hate incidents' to the creation of a special monitoring unit. The implicit idea seems to be that if we stop talking about something the underlying problem will go away. With Britain a tinderbox, and a long summer ahead, this seems a brave moment to test the proposition. It is understandable why age verification and clumsy algorithms sow suspicion of the system itself. In reality, however, online anonymity was always illusory. Your broadband operator has always known who you are and which sites you visit. So has the shady VPN provider. Google collected your pornography browsing history even while you were browsing in 'incognito' mode, for which it was sued, agreeing later to delete billions of records in a settlement. What our alarm reflects is a wholesale loss of trust in the Government. Ofcom points to polling showing the Online Safety Act is widely supported. It is highly regrettable that a bien-pensant blob has cynically hijacked child protection law to ensure it has a media landscape more in keeping with its views. But there's plenty of blame to go around. One lesson of the Online Safety Act is that free-speech advocates also needed a plausible child protection plan. They never came up with one – and were duly steamrollered. The consequences for Britain may be profound.


Daily Mail
an hour ago
- Daily Mail
One of Australia's oldest and most elite private schools costing upwards of $45,000 a year is rocked by scandal involving principal
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Daily Mail
2 hours ago
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Huge update on Tony Mokbel's jailhouse wingman - who cradled the drug kingpin in his arms following his brutal prison bashing
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As the assault attracted attention from other inmates and prison guards, the attackers could be heard screaming: 'You're not an enforcer, this is what you get for talking to the screws you f**king dog.' Bleeding from his mouth and chest, Mokbel was airlifted to Royal Melbourne Hospital in a serious but stable condition after Farrugia cradled his close friend. Mokbel was so severely injured with bleeding on the brain he underwent emergency surgery and was placed in a coma but he survived the attack. The former gangster's fortunes changed after he was bailed and set free from jail on April 4 this year. The 59-year old could not contain his joy as he walked down the steps of the Victorian Supreme Court of Appeal. Mokbel said nothing as he walked through a police cordon shielding him from a horde of journalists and other onlookers. The appeal court released him on bail citing there was a strong chance his remaining convictions would be quashed after they were compromised by the Lawyer X scandal. Back in 2006, Mokbel notoriously bought a yacht named 'Edwena' and hired a Greek crew to spirit him away from Australia while on bail but the following year he was caught. He spent nearly two decades behind bars but was released after the Court of Appeal agreed he had been set up by disgraced former lawyer and police informer Nicola Gobbo. In setting Mokbel free on bail, Justices Karin Emerton, Robert Osborn and Jane Dixon agreed he stood a solid chance of winning his appeal against three convictions for drug trafficking, which is expected to be heard later this year. If he wins, it will likely result in his complete release. His current sentence expires in 2037, but he is eligible for parole in June 2031. Prosecutors had argued Mokbel could not be trusted to comply with his bail conditions given his infamous escape to Greece just before Christmas 2006. Known more widely as 'Lawyer X', Gobbo had been Mokbel's lawyer while informing against him in the early 2000s when he was a kingpin of Melbourne's deadly Underbelly War. It was a 12-year war that began in January 1998 and ended in August 2010 with 36 underworld figures dead. Mokbel had been facing the drug charges he is appealing now when he was tipped off by Ms Gobbo that he was about to be charged over the murder of Michael Marshall. Marshall had been shot in the head outside the South Yarra home he shared with his wife and five-year-old son in 2003. Police had believed the now-dead crime boss Carl Williams was contracted by Mokbel to kill Marshall, who he mistakenly believed had murdered his great friend, another gangland figure Willy Thompson. The charges were ultimately withdrawn in 2009. Mokbel had been jailed in 2012 over Victoria Police drug operations code-named Quills, Magnum, Plutonium and Orbital. Magnum, which earnt Mokbel 20 years, had seen him convicted for trafficking more than 41kg of methylamphetamine while he was already on the run. Orbital - a six year stint - saw him attempt to buy drugs off undercover cops while Quills (13 years) saw him busted for peddling MDMA. As it stands, Mokbel has already served most of the jail time on Quills and Magnum, with the remainder attributed largely to Orbital. Gobbo had first met Mokbel in the Melbourne Magistrates' Court in 1998 when she was acting as a junior for barrister Alex Lewenberg. Mokbel claimed she had been acting on behalf of his brother. In 2002, Mokbel said Gobbo visited him in jail while he was on remand for drug charges. Mokbel claimed Gobbo gave him the hard sell, assuring him she would work hard for him. 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