A 39-year-old woman has been killed after she was hit by a car while walking near Hervey Bay in Queensland last night.

Emergency services were called to the intersection of Toogoom Cane Road and Pialba Burrum Road in Toogoom about 6.25pm.

Police believe the woman was hit by a GWM Cannon ute.

READ MORE: Nedd Brockmann completes gruelling 1600km run, raises $2.6 million

The woman was treated at the scene for critical injuries but died a short time later.

Police said the driver of the ute, a 31-year-old Eli Waters man, was physically uninjured and stopped at the scene to assist the woman.

Authorities are appealing for anyone with dashcam footage to come forward, as investigations continue.

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Australian ultra-marathon legend Nedd Brockmann has crossed the finish line after a gruelling 1600 kilometre run at Sydney Olympic Park.

He completed the final stretch of the Uncomfortable Challenge today, which raised $2.6 million for homelessness charity, We Are Mobilise.

Brockmann was cheered on by a crowd of thousands, who watched Brockmann fight his hardest to finish his final lap.

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Brockmann hugged his mum and burst into tears after finishing the mammoth run.

"I can't wait for a shower," he said as he laid on the track.

Brockmann completed 3,760 laps of the track at Sydney Olympic Park, which is 125.325 master laps (a master lap covers a distance of 12.84 kilometres).

It was also the biggest day of donations yesterday, with over $770,000 raised for the charity.

"12 days, 13 hours, 16 minutes, and 45 seconds. Average 128 kilometres a day. $2.6 million raised for Aussies experiencing homelessness and counting," he said on social media today.

"CONQUER."

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He started on October 3 with a goal to beat the world record – running 1600km in 10 days – while trying to raise $10 million for homelessness charity We Are Mobolise.

While significant injuries prevented him from beating the world record, he has still raised an impressive $2.6 million.

Ashleigh Clarke has been a nurse for nearly a decade but the idea of affording a house is still a pipe dream.

The 32-year-old, who lives in Newcastle in NSW, often worries about rent stress and said she simply can't afford a mortgage under the state's current award pay rates.

Many of Clarke's colleagues are under the same financial strain and it's bleak proof of how Australian healthcare workers are being locked out of the housing and rental market.

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Clarke's woes about low pay and home ownership slipping away sadly aren't unique.

Fresh data from Anglicare Australia reveals the country's housing crisis has led to countless essential workers such as nurses, aged care and ambulance workers being unable to afford rent.

"If I was to seek another [affordable] rental in this current climate or pursue a mortgage, that's out of my reach," Clarke, an emergency room nurse, told 9news.com.au.

"We have looked into [a mortgage] with both of our incomes, and we can't afford it.

"Mortgage prices are astronomical and even closer to my workplace [in Maitland] are out of reach."

Anglicare's Rental Affordability Snapshot included a breakdown of affordable rentals across the country.

It looked at 45,115 rental listings in March 2024 and found just 2.2 per cent – 976 of them – were affordable for the average ambulance worker.

Only 1.5 per cent or 696 were affordable for aged care workers and just 1.4 per cent, a total of 629 rentals, for nurses.

Early childhood workers and construction workers only had 0.9 per cent of the available rentals affordable for their average wages.

The instability of rent is also a great concern for healthcare workers like Clarke.

"You could be given notice and kicked out tomorrow," she said.

"If we were to get kicked out, I would be extremely stressed about finding a place."

READ MORE: Rental increases capped under reforms introduced to NSW parliament

Clarke said she and her fellow nurses feel frustrated and betrayed over their lack of wage growth in NSW.

As a delegate for the NSW Nurses and Midwives' Association (NSWNMA), she is fighting alongside her industry colleagues for a 15 per cent wage increase.

NSW nurses and midwives were found to be living on 2008 wages, adjusted for inflation.

"They called us heroes in COVID," Clarke said, "but they can't even give us a pay rise."

"As a nurse, nine years in, I'm almost doing the job of two nurses some days and still getting paid the same," Clarke added.

"Whereas you could have someone who is a CEO of a company, it doesn't matter if you don't turn up to work that day, they're still getting paid."

Survey findings from the NSWNMA also painted a concerning picture of the healthcare industry's housing insecurity.

Half of all nurses and midwives surveyed in NSW were found to be renting.

Its housing advocacy report noted 47 per cent of respondents were "worried about losing their place to live" and 60 per cent felt they were experiencing rental stress.

Rental stress is defined as when a person is spending more than 30 per cent of their income on rent.

Anglicare's report, meanwhile, came with an urgent plea to the government to boost social housing so all Australian healthcare workers can have an affordable roof over their heads. 

"It should be a national scandal that so few of our essential workers can afford to keep a roof over their head," Anglicare Australia executive director Kasy Chambers said.

"Our Snapshot shows that more and more essential workers are being pushed into serious rental stress – and pushed out of their own communities.

"Virtually no part of Australia is affordable for aged care workers, early childhood educators, cleaners, nurses and many other essential workers we rely on. It's no wonder so many critical industries are facing worker shortages."

On Friday, King Charles and Queen Camilla will touch down in Australia for a royal visit to Sydney and Canberra.

Perth entrepreneur Casey Bryden can't help but think back to the last time the royal couple came Down Under nine years ago in 2015 and how it set her and her mother on the path of an "insane adventure".

Back then, Bryden – who quit her job in marketing when she had her first child – was running a small hobby business with her mother, Jillian Intini, selling parasols online and at markets.

READ MORE: Where you can see King Charles and Queen Camilla during the visit

"My mum is a nurse, and she was seeing lots of women come through with skin cancer, and she wanted to change her own approach to sun care," Bryden said.

"So she bought some old umbrellas at a swap meet, cut them up herself, went to Spotlight, bought block-out fabric and made her own parasol. 

"It sounds tacky, but the thing that she made was actually really beautiful, and her friends loved it. 

"I said, if we can make these, I feel like we could sell them."

Sun Bella got off to a steady, but somewhat slow, start, Bryden said.

"It was really just plodding along in the background, we were selling them online and when a sale would come through Mum and I would text each other, 'Sold one!'"

Then came the moment that changed everything, when Bryden heard that the then Prince Charles and Duchess of Cornwall would be heading to Perth.

"Someone said, 'Camilla's coming, you should try and get a parasol to her,'" Bryden said.

"So we set out on pretty much an impossible task, and never thought that it would happen."

They set about crafting a personalised version of Sun Bella's parasol, with the handle hand-turned by a local retired engineer at the Stirling Community Men's Shed.

To get their parasol in Camilla's hands, Bryden reached out to the Department of the Premier and Cabinet to see if they needed a gift for the Duchess.

"They accepted my offer – on the condition that they could pay us for it," Bryden said.

READ MORE: King Charles says he won't interfere if Australians vote for republic

But even then it wasn't a certainty, Bryden said, with the department's representative saying they couldn't make any promises.

However, sure enough, the Duchess was soon filmed strolling the grounds of Government House with the parasol.

In a moment of serendipity for the mother and daughter duo, the royals' visit to Western Australia coincided with an extreme heatwave.

The parasol almost never left Camilla's hands during their entire sweltering visit to WA, Bryden said.

"It was unbearably hot. Poor Charles was given an Akubra and it was so hot that he kept taking it off, while Camilla looked effortlessly cool for the entire trip," she said.

While it was a personal thrill to see Camilla using their parasol, what it did for their tiny business was crazy, Bryden added. 

"We just really didn't know what we were getting ourselves into. We were still packing our own orders back in those days," she said. 

As Bryden, her mother and father were sorting out the orders on their kitchen table, Bryden said she noticed the sales rolling in on her open laptop.

"We were packing these parasols in bloody tubes, and the computer was sitting on the kitchen bench, but it was going ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching, literally faster than we could pack one order," she said.

In the space of two weeks, Sun Bella sold $20,000 worth of parasols, compared to their usual $1000 worth at the time. 

"It catapulted our business from a hobby to a real business," she said.

The genius marketing move, which many start-ups are likely to attempt to replicate during the royal visit this week, has had a lingering effect on their now successful business, Bryden said.

"I actually had a lady a couple of months ago who purchased a parasol, and she still had the newspaper clipping from 2015."

Do you have a story? Contact reporter Emily McPherson at em********@******om.au

The artificial intelligence boom has benefited chatbot makers, computer scientists and Nvidia investors. It's also providing an unusual windfall for Anguilla, a tiny island in the Caribbean.

ChatGPT's debut nearly two years ago heralded the dawn of the AI age and kicked off a digital gold rush as companies scrambled to stake their own claims by acquiring websites that end in .ai.

That's where Anguilla comes in. The British territory was allotted control of the .ai internet address in the 1990s.

READ MORE: Popular Sydney beach shut down by mysterious debris

It was one of hundreds of obscure top-level domains assigned to individual countries and territories based on their names. While the domains are supposed to indicate a website has a link to a particular region or language, it's not always a requirement.

Google uses google.ai to showcase its artificial intelligence services while Elon Musk uses x.ai as the homepage for his Grok AI chatbot. Startups like AI search engine Perplexity have also snapped up .ai web addresses, redirecting users from the .com version.

Anguilla's earnings from web domain registration fees quadrupled last year to $US32 million ($48.8 million), fuelled by the surging interest in AI. The income now accounts for about 20 per cent of Anguilla's total government revenue. Before the AI boom, it hovered at around 5 per cent.

Anguilla's government, which uses the gov.ai home page, collects a fee every time a .ai web address is renewed, Identity Digital Chief Strategy Officer Ram Mohan said the fee — $140 for two years — won't change. It also gets paid when new addresses are registered and expired ones are sold off. Some sites have fetched tens of thousands of dollars.

The money directly boosts the economy of Anguilla, which is just 91 square kilometres and has a population of about 16,000.

Blessed with coral reefs, clear waters and palm-fringed white sand beaches, the island is a haven for uber-wealthy tourists. Still, many residents are underprivileged and tourism has been battered by the pandemic and, before that, a powerful hurricane.

READ MORE: Young woman killed in fiery crash

Anguilla doesn't have its own AI industry though Premier Ellis Webster hopes that one day it will become an hub for the technology. He said it was just luck that it was Anguilla, and not nearby Antigua, that was assigned the .ai domain in 1995 because both places had those letters in their names.

Webster said the money takes the pressure off government finances and helps fund key projects, but cautioned that "we can't rely on it solely".

"You can't predict how long this is going to last," Webster said in an interview with the AP.

"And so I don't want to have our economy and our country and all our programs just based on this.

"And then all of a sudden there's a new fad comes up in the next year or two, and then we are left now having to make significant expenditure cuts, removing programs."

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To help keep up with the explosive growth in domain registrations, Anguilla said Tuesday it's signing a deal with a US-based domain management company, Identity Digital, to help manage the effort. They said the agreement will mean more revenue for the government while improving the resilience and security of the web addresses.

Identity Digital, which also manages Australia's .au domain, expects to migrate all .ai domain services to its systems by the start of next year, Mohan said in an interview.

A local software entrepreneur had previously helped Anguilla set up its registry system decades earlier.

There are now more than 533,000 .ai web domains, an increase of more than 10-fold since 2018. The International Monetary Fund said in a May report that the earnings will help diversify the economy, "thus making it more resilient to external shocks.

Webster expects domain-related revenues to rise further, and could even double this year from last year's $US32 million.

He said the money will finance the airport's expansion, free medical care for senior citizens and completion of a vocational technology training centre at Anguilla's high school.

The income also provides "budget support" for other projects the government is eyeing, such as a national development fund it could quickly tap for hurricane recovery efforts. The island normally relies on assistance from its administrative power, Britain, which comes with conditions, Webster said.

Mohan said working with Identity Digital will also defend against cyber crooks trying to take advantage of the hype around artificial intelligence.

He cited the example of Tokelau, an island in the Pacific Ocean, whose .tk addresses became notoriously associated with spam and phishing after outsourcing its registry services.

"We worry about bad actors taking something, sticking a .ai to it, and then making it sound like they are much bigger or much better than what they really are," Mohan said, adding that the company's technology will quickly take down shady sites.

Another benefit is .ai websites will no longer need to connect to the government's digital infrastructure through a single internet cable to the island, which leaves them vulnerable to digital bottlenecks or physical disruptions.

Now they'll use the company's servers distributed globally, which means it will be faster to access them because they'll be closer to users.

"It goes from milliseconds to microseconds," Mohan said.

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The Biden administration has sent a letter to the Israeli government demanding it act to improve the humanitarian situation in Gaza within the next 30 days or risk violating US laws governing foreign military assistance, suggesting US military aid could be in jeopardy.

The Sunday letter, jointly written by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin, is addressed to Israeli Minister of Defence Yoav Gallant and Minister of Strategic Affairs Ron Dermer.

It marks a significant new step by the US to try to compel Israel to facilitate the delivery of humanitarian aid into Gaza.

READ MORE: Popular Sydney beach shut down by mysterious debris

They write that the US has deep concerns about the situation and ask for "urgent and sustained actions by your government this month to reverse this trajectory".

Since this spring, the amount of aid delivered to Gaza has dropped more than 50 per cent and the quantity delivered in September "was the lowest of any month during the past year", they added.

The deadline falls after the US presidential election on November 5.

Despite the stern warning, however, the US has continued to provide military assistance to Israel, including an advanced air defense system and US troops which began to arrive in the country on Monday.

Future US aid could be at risk, however. The letter, dated October 13, notes that the US State and Defense departments, under US law, "must continually assess" Israel's adherence to its assurances made earlier this year that it would not restrict aid flows into the enclave.

The US' list of demands is extensive. Israel must allow at least 350 trucks a day to enter Gaza through all four major crossings, the letter says, in addition to opening a fifth crossing.

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Israel must also over the next month implement humanitarian pauses across Gaza as necessary to enable humanitarian activities, including vaccinations and aid distribution for at least the next four months.

The US is also demanding that Israel allow people in the Al-Mawasi humanitarian zone inside Gaza to move inland before winter and enhance security for humanitarian convoys and movements.

Israel must also take action to ensure that the Jordan Armed forces corridors are functioning at "full and continuous capacity".

The letter closes by calling for a new channel between the US and Israeli governments to "raise and discuss civilian harm incidents", with the first meeting to be held at the end of the month.

READ MORE: The Sydney man who taught future King to surf

Israel's military operations in northern Gaza have intensified in recent weeks, and the Israeli military has called on civilians there to evacuate to the south, where more than one million displaced Palestinians are already sheltering.

The UN World Food Programme warned last weekend that Israeli military operations are having a "disastrous impact" on food security for Palestinian families.

Blinken and Austin wrote that the Israeli government's actions appear to be contributing to the worsening humanitarian situation.

"We are particularly concerned that recent actions by the Israeli government – including halting commercial imports, denying or impeding nearly 90 per cent of humanitarian movements between northern and southern Gaza in September, continuing burdensome and excessive dual-use restrictions, and instituting new vetting and onerous liability and customs requirements for humanitarian staff and shipments – together with increased lawlessness and looting – are contributing to an accelerated deterioration in the conditions in Gaza," they said.

Israel appears to already be responding to the letter, at least indirectly. Just one day after the letter was sent, COGAT, the Israeli agency that manages policy for the Palestinian territories and the flow of aid into the strip, tweeted photos of aid going into Gaza.

"30 trucks entered northern Gaza through the Erez Crossing earlier today. Israel is not preventing the entry of humanitarian aid, with an emphasis on food, into Gaza," COGAT said in a post on X.

"Israel will continue to allow the entry of humanitarian aid to the residents of Gaza, while simultaneously destroying Hamas' military and governance infrastructures."

Israel assures US it won't strike Iranian nuclear or oil sites, US officials say

The Biden administration believes it has won assurances from Israel that it will not hit Iranian nuclear or oil sites as it looks to strike back following Iran's missile barrage earlier this month, two US officials said on Tuesday (early Wednesday AEDT).

The administration also believes that sending a US Terminal High Altitude Area Defense battery to Israel and roughly 100 soldiers to operate it has eased some of Israel's concerns about possible Iranian retaliation and general security issues.

The Pentagon on Sunday announced the THAAD deployment to help bolster Israel's air defences following Iran's ballistic missile attacks on Israel in April and October, saying it was authorised at the direction of US President Joe Biden.

However, the US officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private diplomatic discussions, cautioned that the assurance is not iron-clad and that circumstances could change. The officials also noted that Israel's track record on fulfilling assurances in the past is mixed and has often reflected domestic Israeli politics that have upended Washington's expectations.

The most recent example of that was last month when US officials were told by their Israeli counterparts that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would welcome a US- and French-led temporary ceasefire initiative for Lebanon only to see Israel launch a massive airstrike that killed Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah two days later.

Netanyahu's office said in a statement that "we listen to the opinions of the United States, but we will make our final decisions based on our national interests".

The Middle East has been bracing for an expected response from Israel after Iran launched roughly 180 ballistic missiles on October 1, which the US helped to fend off.

The tit-for-tat strikes and uncertainty about whether Israel might strike strategically important energy and nuclear sites in Iran have raised fears about escalation into an all-out regional war.

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Police are on the hunt for dognappers who broke into a dog shelter on the Gold Coast over the weekend and stole a beloved canine.

Workers at the Animal Welfare League have scrambled to repair damaged kennels after Blaze the husky was stolen.

"Blaze had been taken from his kennel… it seems as though somebody or a group of people have broken into the premises (and have) destroyed padlocks, have destroyed kennel fencing," Caroline Esera from the Animal Welfare League said.

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The dognappers appeared to have gained access to the shelter through bushland at the back, scaling a fence and breaking multiple padlocks, leaving other dogs – including Blaze's good friend Maggie – distraught.

"The other dogs were really frantic," Esera said. 

"Maggie was really, really upset. 

"We can't separate the two dogs because they're such close friends so she would have been really traumatised by the event."

Fortunately, Blaze was found safe and sound on Sunday at Harbour Town, thanks to a member of the public who identified him by the tag on his neck, and has since been reunited with Maggie.

Police are still on the hunt for those involved.

This article was produced with the assistance of 9ExPress.

Research shows stress can negatively impact our mood, relationships and overall wellbeing. So when it comes to our working lives, it might be time to consider a switch to a low-stress role.

Exclusive: A Perth great-grandmother being treated for kidney failure in Western Australia's biggest public hospital has been left traumatised, claiming her bed collapsed and trapped her.

Confronting images showed Anne Hibbert bruised from head to toe after she said she was trapped in the railing of a bed at Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital for hours.

She said she pressed the call button repeatedly but nobody came.

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"The nurse said to me, 'Look, there's nothing we can do. You'll just have to sit here and wait for the day shift to come on'," Ms Hibbert said.

The 78-year-old was rushed to Joondalup Hospital last month with failing kidneys.

Doctors said if she didn't transfer for dialysis, she'd be dead within days.

It was supposed to be her last night at Sir Charles Gairdner when she woke to the sound of a deflating bed.

"All of a sudden, I was stuck and this arm was right next to the railing," she said.

After four painful hours, orderlies finally came to her aid.

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Tony Hibbert is demanding answers to what happened to his wife.

"She's left with this dreadful pain, she cries at night in bed," he said.

" … You know, it's heartbreaking."

Ms Hibbert said she'd been scared of beds ever since, even her own.

The Hibberts lodged a complaint with the hospital – and were told a clinical nurse was investigating. Ten days on they had heard nothing more.

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"Our nurses are very much under pressure," Australian Nursing Federation state secretary Romina Raschilla said.

"They're short-staffed. They are just running back and forth during their shifts."

The North Metropolitan Health Service issued a statement to 9News.

"We take all complaints seriously," it said.

"We are still investigating the matter."

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The only Tesla Cybertruck in the country is heading to South Australia's Bay to Birdwood car rally this Sunday.

9News was granted access as the stainless steel showstopper was unveiled on the streets of Adelaide for the first time.

Its ultra-modern design stands in stark contrast to the vintage vehicles that typically grace the Bay to Birdwood. 

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"People have got a chance to be on the side of the road to see the very latest and the very oldest and see a great parade of cars in between," rally organiser John Hancock said.

Only 300 South Australians managed to reserve a Cybertruck back in 2020, including Adelaide's Kane Ellis, who test-drove the vehicle in Los Angeles earlier this year.

"Obviously the armour, stainless steel plating, it's super heavy, it gets super hot in the sun," he said.

READ MORE: Almost half of low-income Aussies are going hungry, grim new report shows

"It's like a driving refrigerator."

While the exact release date and price for the Cybertruck in Australia remains uncertain, the model currently in Adelaide sells for about AU$120,000 in the United States.

Ellis says it would be a cool experience for Australians to see them on the road, but there could be a long wait.

"No one knows, it could be a year, it could be two years, it could be five or never," Ellis said.

This article was produced with the assistance of 9ExPress.