Need a national news snapshot first thing - well, we have you covered.
Regional news:
► ALBURY: Continuing on despite their sorrow simply wasn’t negotiable for the family of South Albury farmer Daryl Gray.
“I would call it a duty,” his brother Byron said of Willowbank’s presence at Saturday’s farmers market on Lincoln Causeway. Read more.
► MANDURAH: A thirteen-year-old Mandurah girl will represent Western Australia in a national sailing championship next month.
Year 9 Frederick Irwin student Georgia Payne, with her crew Daniel Brown, will sail on one of two boats from Western Australia to compete in the Nacra15 National Championships in Lake Macquarie, New South Wales, from 14 to 17 April. Read more.
► BALLARAT: When 18-year-old Jacob Everett’s four-wheel-drive ran off the road and struck a tree the apprentice boiler was not speeding, alcohol affected or on drugs. He was just tired. Jacob’s car struck a tree along the Avenue of Honour at around 80 km/h an hour. He died instantly. Read more.
► BURNIE: Thousands of tiny silver triangles hang in chains from the roof of Burnie City Council.
Visitors stare upwards, captivated by the magnificent sight of these rain-like chains shimmering in the sunlight and swaying in the breeze. Read more.
► WOOLOMIN: IT’S the heart of a tiny community near the brimming bank of Chaffey Dam, and despite what’s been nothing short of a tumultuous 12 months, it’s beating as strong as ever.
The Woolomin Gold Rush Store was thrust in to spotlight just year ago, when the shop’s underground fuel storage leaked into the town’s ground water. Read more.
► WAGGA WAGGA: Wagga’s renown ‘plant man’ has risen from the soil and sprouted at Saturday’s Food and Wine Festival.
Chris Kanck, a horticulturist who channelled his “crush on Poison Ivy” with an out-of-the-ordinary outfit at the 2016 Gold Cup, resurfaced for some “quality” local produce. Read more.
► TASMANIA: Tasmania has a rich and interesting convict past, and there is no better place to see and experience it than Ross.
Ross is home to one of four female factories across the state, which 12,000 female convicts passed through. Read more.
► NEWCASTLE: A new union for hairdressers is gearing up to fight a threatened clip to their weekend penalty rates, with Newcastle hairdresser Melanie Coombs saying they already get "paid peanuts".
The hairdresser of nine years said she is "absolutely furious" at the threat to weekend penalty rates. Read more.
► KURRI KURRI: It was a great idea that has lasted the test of time but now the instigators are looking for new blood.
After getting concerned about the loss of native bushland in the south-west, a group of local people pursued an offer from local farmer Morris Duffield in 1985 and bought a 32 hectare bush block at Naringal that he had never had the heart to clear. Read more.
► NEWCASTLE: The University of Newcastle women’s convener has backed a petition for better lighting on campus and more tailored sexual complaint reporting.
The online petition, from the Newcastle University women’s and queer collectives and titled “End rape on campus at UoN”, calls for improved lighting “[on] the pathways to residences… between the Shortland and Hunter sides of Callaghan campus [and] in all car parks”. Read more.
National news:
► Australia has taken a lone stand as the only country in its neighbourhood to boycott negotiations for a new global treaty to ban nuclear weapons.
Talks expected to include up to 120 nations are to get underway in New York on Monday, yet the Turnbull government has decided Australia will not participate in drafting the new treaty. Read more.
► Bookmaker Tom Waterhouse is at the centre of a bitter dispute in the online gambling sector over how much ground the industry should give up to resuscitate its public image. Read more.
► It was an illness that almost claimed her life. There were days when she couldn't leave the house, or even get out of bed.
But for years after she was diagnosed, Shannai Pearce was too afraid to get help. Read more.
► New South Wales roads authorities are considering retrofitting airconditioning units and noise insulation to apartments in dense inner-city suburbs where they are widening roads to accommodate traffic moving onto and off the WestConnex motorway. Read more.
National weather radar:
International News:
► DILI: When invading Indonesian troops parachuted into Dili in 1975 Filomena Gomes fled into East Timor's cloud-shrouded mountains and for four years scrounged food and cooked for guerrilla fighters.
She remembers a tall, handsome fighter by the name of Xanana.
"He liked to eat a soup made from corn, pumpkin and papaya leaves," she says of the man who became the hero of East Timor's independence, and remains the most powerful figure in Asia's youngest democracy. Read more.
► WASHINGTON: Donald Trump's bid to ram a new healthcare system through Congress collapsed in a heap on Friday after rebel Republicans refused to bend to a presidential ultimatum that they all should back the controversial bill.
"We just pulled it," Trump said of the abandonment for the second time in as many days of a scheduled house vote, after House Speaker Paul Ryan had briefed him on the failure of a frenzied overnight effort to marshal votes. Read more.
► LONDON: The Westminster attacker Khalid Masood was born Adrian Russell Ajao and was from Dartford in Kent but took on a number of aliases before his murderous rampage targeting Britain's parliament this week. Read more.
On this day:
1953 – Polio breakthrough: US researcher Dr Jonas E Salk announces a new vaccine to immunise against polio.
1945 – World War II: The Battle of Iwo Jima ends after about 22,000 Japanese are killed or captured and more than 4500 US troops are killed.
1942 – The Germans begin sending Jews to Auschwitz in Poland.
1885 – Film first: The Eastman Dry Plate and Film Co of Rochester, New York, manufactures the first commercial motion picture film.
1827 – German composer Ludwig Van Beethoven dies in Vienna. He had been deaf for the later part of his life, but said on his death bed “I shall hear in heaven.”
Faces of Australia: Emma Duncan
DIETERS are at the mercy of their own bodies, which fight to pull them back to their old weights, a study on former The Biggest Loser contestants shows.
Former Newcastle contestant, Emma Duncan, said while she had regained some of the 62 kilograms she had lost on the show, she had managed to maintain a healthy weight for the past four years.
