US juice and smoothie chain Jamba will soon open up in Australia, with locations set for Melbourne and the Sunshine Coast.

The first Australian Jamba store will open at Melbourne Central this month, with a plan to expand to the Sunshine Coast and then to other metropolitan and regional areas across Australia.

The brand focuses on selling products with natural ingredients, no added sugars and preservatives.

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"Jamba is committed to bringing real, high-quality ingredients and delicious choices, for health-conscious, Aussies," Newford QSR Group Managing Director Danny Cheung said.

Jamba, previously known as Jamba Juice, has expanded its menu to smoothies, bowls, and sandwiches.

The brand is known for its blended fruit and vegetable juices and first opened in 1990 in San Luis Obispo, California.

The brand has nearly 800 locations, predominantly in the US but also in the Philippines, Taiwan, South Korea and Thailand.

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The company decided to expand into the Australian market to tap into the uptick of health-conscious Australians.

Over the next five years, the company will open Jamba in Queensland and Victoria, before looking to expand to NSW in late 2025.

"We want Jamba to become a staple product," Cheung said.

"We have many exciting campaigns and partnerships lined up to turn a product that took America by storm into Australian households."

A senior police officer expressed frustration with St Johns’ response time.

It’s alleged four cars travelling in convoy began racing and overtaking each other.

Two men have been charged with attempted murder and several other offences after a string of alleged violent offences over three weeks in Queensland.

It is alleged an 18-year-old man and a 19-year-old man broke into a home in Rockville in the Toowoomba region on October 18 and became involved in an altercation with another man inside the house.

Police have alleged the 68-year-old man was struck with a tomahawk and was seriously injured before the 18-year-old and 19-year-old left the scene.

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Meanwhile, on November 6, a man was sitting in his car on Goombungee Road in Harlaxton when a 19-year-old man opened his car before he allegedly threatened him and hit him with the blunt end of the knife.

Police said the man drove away with minor injuries.

Minutes later, a man and woman were changing a tyre on a vehicle which was also parked on Goombungee Road in Harlaxton when an allegedly stolen Hyundai Veloster pulled up beside them.

Police said two men got out of the car and allegedly threatened the pair with a meat cleaver, a knife and an axe while demanding they hand over the keys to the car but the pair refused.

Both alleged offenders then left in a car they arrived in, which was allegedly stolen from a home on Grenier Street in Toowoomba, the day before on November 5.

The car was later found abandoned at nearby Griffith Street.

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Police arrested an 18-year-old man at a home in Harlaxton soon afterwards.

About 12.30pm, a 19-year-old man allegedly stole items from a home on Hill Street in Toowoomba City, during which time a 46-year-old man in the home was allegedly assaulted with a piece of timber.

The offender fled and further enquiries by officers located the 19-year-old man at an address in Wilsonton.

Police found the 19-year-old man at a home in Wilsonton later in the afternoon.

An 18-year-old man has been charged with attempted murder, attempting to enter a premises and commit an indictable offence and entering a dwelling with intent.

A 19-year-old man has been charged with nine offences, including attempted murder, attempted robbery armed in company, attempting to enter a premises and commit an indictable offence and receiving tainted property.

Both men are expected to appear before Toowoomba Magistrates Court today.

Woolworths has announced it will cut the price of lamb products over coming weeks in what it says is a pre-Christmas present amid the cost of living crisis.

The supermarket giant has confirmed the cost of 26 lamb cuts will be reduced by 20 per cent from tomorrow until December 27, 2023.

Woolworths said the move was part of its Prices Dropped for Christmas program to give "more Christmas savings to help customers spend less this festive season".

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It is expected the price of a kilogram of leg of lamb will drop from $10 per kilogram to $8 per kilogram.

The move comes amid a crisis facing Australian livestock farmers impacted by an oversupply, falling prices and concerns about a forecast dry summer.

Despite a drop in prices at the sale yards for farmers, retailers have been slow to pass on reductions to consumers.

Industry data released last month showed lamb bought on the farm has collapsed 50 per cent in the last year, with lamb bought at the shop down less than 10 per cent.

But those processing, transporting and selling the meat told 9News their costs have also surged.

READ MORE: Daylesford mourns as all victims of pub crash named

Victorian farmer Scott Young said he had never seen "prices fall so quickly".

He was getting $4.70 a kilo for the lamb he produces, a price crash resulting from mass selling ahead of a forecast hot and dry summer.

The Australian Meat Industry Council said the problem was due to labour shortages in the supply chain.

Woolworths expects to sell 1.7 million kilograms of lamb leg roast this Christmas season.



As mortgage holders brace for a Melbourne Cup Day interest rate hike this afternoon, Mark Bouris has warned such a rise could lead Australia into a recession.

The Reserve Bank will hand down their decision on whether interest rates will rise at 2.30pm today.

Most economists have tipped the central bank to lift the cash rate by 25 basis points, from 4.1 per cent to 4.35 per cent.

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https://omny.fm/shows/ben-fordham-full-show/recession-mark-bouris-warns-against-rba-rate-rise/embed

While all signs lead to a rate rise, Bouris warned 2GB's Ben Fordham that it wasn't the question of "will they? but should they?".

"If they do, this will be the interest rate that stops the nation," the Yellow Brick Road founder told Fordham.

"Because I actually think if they actually do this, we might find ourselves falling into a recession," Bouris said.

"I'm one of the few people that's saying the Reserve Bank does not need to put the rates up.

"We seem to be willing ourselves to put the rates up, I don't what it is it's like a hysteria.

"If you look at the data, the data indicates that there will not be an interest rate rise today, on Melbourne Cup Day."

Bouris believed Governor Bullock should hold off on the rate rise, as businesses increase borrowing in the lead-up to the busy Christmas period.

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"All these business owners have mortgages, most of them have lines of credit to run their business, overdrafts," he said.

"Right now for example they're all stocking up for Christmas, so they all go out and borrow money and they're borrowing money at a higher interest rate that they've ever seen in the last 10 years."

Bouris said that those particular business owners were struggling and would likely look to cut costs.

"They're the sort of people that will say 'you know what next year in 2024' we can't afford to have as many staff," he said.

"When they start cutting back on the costs, one of the biggest ones is staff, they put people off, all of a sudden the unemployment number starts to increase."

However, he dampened concerns when Fordham asked him whether he believed Australians would see a rate rise today.

"I don't think they will. No," he replied.

Police have arrested two protesters after they attacked a famous Diego Velázquez painting at the National Gallery in London, smashing the glass with hammers.

The pair, from the climate activist group, Just Stop Oil, repeatedly hit and broke the glass on the Rokeby Venus painting with safety hammers before they were arrested.

Rokeby Venus, painted by Velázquez in the 1600s, was slashed by the suffragette Mary Richardson in 1914.

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One of the protesters who launched the attack said: "Women did not get the vote by voting; it is time for deeds, not words".

The group has made multiple attacks on some of the world's most fabled artworks as it tries to drive home its goal of stopping the use of fossil fuels.

Protesters threw tomato soup on Vincent van Gogh's Sunflowers, glued themselves to a copy of Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper and did the same to Johannes Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring.

The group has disrupted several major sporting events, including golf's Open Championship, Wimbledon, the Ashes and World Snooker Championship

A performance of the musical Les Misérables was also targeted, with activists clambering onto the stage, carrying Just Stop Oil banners.

The Velázquez has been removed from display so it can be examined by staff.

If it's hard to imagine what it feels like to give $1 million to charity and then get criticised for it, just ask billionaire Jeff Bezos.

In January 2020, as the deadly Black Summer bushfires scorched Australia, Bezos logged onto his Instagram account and announced Amazon, the company he founded, was donating $1 million to victims.

At the time, Bezos' net worth was estimated at $US116 billion.

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Vice pointed out $1 million was a mere .00059 per cent of Bezos' personal fortune, while Business Insider framed the figure as less than five minutes of income for the world's second richest man.

After the Black Summer bushfires, which burned 24 million hectares (an area the size of Turkey), killed 33 people, destroyed 3000 homes and inflicted billions of dollars of damage, Amazon changed tack.

The online retail giant decided it could best help victims of natural disasters by flexing its powerful logistic muscles, instead.

Over the past three years, Amazon has opened six disaster relief hubs around the country – two in Melbourne and facilities in Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth.

Stocked inside the hubs are 220,000 items – donated by Amazon – ready to be whipped out to emergency zones.

Amazon has long used machine learning, and more recently AI, to anticipate and source what customers want to buy online, and they're applying the same tech to disaster relief.

The computer algorithms, paired with on-the-ground experience, helped Amazon work out what things people need most in the crucial first days of an emergency, or when they are suddenly been made homeless.

The packs, put together by Amazon volunteers, include toiletries, first aid kits, tents, tarpaulins, sleeping bags, kids' colouring books, water and other items.

As workers brace for an extreme bushfire season this summer, the hubs have bustled with activity the past few months.

Charlotte Richardson, who leads Amazon's disaster relief efforts in Australia, said Amazon has learned lessons from the Black Summer fires and assisting nonprofit charities and partners in more than 115 disasters here and around the world.

"We sort of quickly realised that the best way for us to be able to leverage our business was through the establishment of a disaster relief hub where we could work with our vendors and suppliers," Richardson said.

"The feedback that we've had from our nonprofit (partners) is that storage and transport and procurement of relief items is really essential and something they genuinely need a lot of help with."

Since launching the hubs in Australia, Amazon has sent out more than 550,000 items in 14 disasters, including bushfires, floods and COVID outbreaks.

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Abe Diaz, the head of Amazon's global disaster relief program, said the mission is to bring Amazon's delivery efficiency to disaster zones.

"For our relief partners, we are the one-stop shop that enables them to support and serve people quickly and more efficiently," he said, when 9news.com.au recently toured Amazon's headquarters in the US.

Trying to source products after a disaster had struck was too slow and didn't make sense, he said.

Instead, Diaz said, Amazon's power and scale allows it to get items close to disaster zones before they are needed, and store them in a way charities and non-profits can't.

"That financial commitment (of storage) can be too much for them to handle," Diaz said.

"Amazon is able to use our scale and existing networks to shoulder these loads."

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Diaz said delivering what disaster victims and charities actually need is crucial, and helps avoid what disaster relief groups call "the second disaster", when a flood of unwanted donated goods is sent to the frontlines.

"Our flexible logistics allows us to quickly source and ship supplies that would otherwise be difficult to acquire locally," Diaz said, "things like can openers, because when you have lost everything, what good is canned food if you can't open it?"

Since the program began in 2017, Amazon said it has donated 23 million items in more than 115 disasters including bushfires, floods, hurricanes and landslides.

The reporter travelled to Seattle for the 'Delivering the Future' media event as a guest of Amazon. Amazon did not pay for this content.

A sunken Spanish galleon laden with treasure, described by some as the "Holy Grail of shipwrecks", is set to raised from the seafloor and lawyers are circling.

The Colombian government said the San Jose, a three-masted ship sunk by the British navy in 1708, would be recovered as a matter of urgency, including treasures believed to be worth up to $20 billion in today's money.

Scientists found the San Jose in 2015 off the coast of Colombia, solving one of one of maritime history's most enduring mysteries.

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After it was hit during a battle with British ships in the War of Spanish Succession, the San Jose sank to the ocean floor with a treasure of gold, silver and emeralds on board.

That treasure has been the subject of legal battles between several nations as well as private salvage companies.

When the ship was found, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos described the ship's haul as "the most valuable treasure that has been found in the history of humanity".

The Colombian government said the ship will be brought above water before President Gustavo Petro ends his term of office in 2026.

The exact location of the wreck remains a secret – it sank somewhere in the wide area off Colombia's Baru peninsula, south of Cartagena.

It's believed the San Jose was carrying 11 million gold and silver coins, emeralds and other precious items from Spanish-controlled colonies.

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Only a handful of the ship's crew of 600 survived when the San Jose sank.

A US salvage consortium known as Glocca Morra claimed to have found the ship in 1981.

But the Colombian government disputes this, saying a team of divers under its command discovered the wreck at a different location, which remains secret.

According to Bloomberg, the syndicate is suing the Colombian government for half the treasure, worth $10 billion.

The arbitration case is being heard in London.

The tight-knit community of Daylesford in Victoria came together overnight to mourn the deaths of five people killed after a car smashed into a beer garden at a local pub.

Pratibha Sharma, her husband Jatin Chugh, and her daughter Anvi were sitting at the Royal Hotel in Daylesford when a white BMW SUV crashed into outdoor tables about 6pm on Sunday.

Sharma and Chugh died at the scene. Nine-year-old Anvi was flown to hospital but did not survive her injuries.

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Their friend Vivek Bhatia, 38, and his 11-year-old son Vihaan were the two others killed, according to The Age.

Bhatia's wife, a 36-year-old woman, and a second son, aged six, were both injured in the crash.

The six-year-old was initially in a critical condition with broken legs and internal injuries but has since stabilised.

Another group, which included an 11-month-old baby boy, was also injured. The child's mother was not hurt, however another two people with them were hospitalised.

Victoria Police Chief Commissioner Shane Patton said it's believed that none of those killed were locals, but were all tourists visiting the popular town.

The driver of the BMW, a 66-year-old man, was taken to hospital and treated for shock and minor injuries.

He is not believed to have been under the influence of drugs or alcohol, and police will investigate whether he suffered a medical episode at the wheel.

It's expected he will be interviewed by police today.

The community came together overnight in a park vigil to commemorate the victims and mourn their loss.