A 13-year-old boy has died after he was hit by a truck when he stepped off a bus south of Sydney last week.

Emergency services treated the boy at the intersection of Church Street and Appin Road in Appin about 3.30pm last Wednesday.

"The boy was treated by NSW Ambulance paramedics on scene before he was taken to the Children's Hospital at Westmead in a critical condition," NSW Police said in a statement.

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Officers have been told the boy has died in hospital.

"The truck driver, a 38-year-old man, was not injured and underwent mandatory testing at Campbelltown Hospital," police said.

Investigations are continuing.

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Australian banks closed more than 400 local branches across the country in the past year to the end of June, new figures released today show.

Shutting their doors for the final time during the 12-month period were 424 branches – or 11 per cent of all bank outlets – annual data published by the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) shows.

Included in the closures were 122 bank branches in regional and remote areas, which amounts to around 7 per cent of branches outside of Australia's major cities.

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Since 2017, the number of bank branches have been slashed by more than a third in cities and regional areas.

The national data collection agency for the financial sector has also been monitoring a steep decline in the number of ATMs.

The number of ATMs available to withdraw cash also fell by 11 percent in the last year to June 30, with more than 700 cash machines removed from operation during the 12-month period.

Since 2017, the number of ATMs in operation has plummeted by a massive 60 per cent.

There are now fewer than 6000 cash machines across the country.

The figures come as the Senate conducts an inquiry into bank closures in regional Australia, chaired by Senator Matt Canavan, which is due to release its final report in May next year.

Bosses from the big four banks fronted the inquiry last month at a hearing in Canberra, with the top executives all pointing to cost pressures and changing customer demands as major reasons for branch closures.

Commonwealth Bank CEO Matt Comyn said the bank had reduced its branch footprint over time as "the way customers engage with banks continues to change".

Westpac CEO Peter King said it was using technology to connect the group's brands to regional customers.

ANZ CEO Shayne Elliott said the reality was customers were "rapidly moving towards digital channels".

The Commonwealth Bank and Westpac have committed to keeping all regional bank branches open while the inquiry is being conducted. 

APRA said it was closely following the progress of the Senate inquiry and would continue to support its work.

Jason Bryce runs Cash Welcome, a group which campaigns against moves towards a cashless society. 

The decline in the number of bank branches and ATMs had made it harder than ever for Australians to pay with cash, Bryce said.

"Australians don't want to lose access to cash or their right to choose cash to pay for essential goods and services," Bryce said.

"Consumers and businesses need cash and banking for our local economies to thrive.

"Even people who don't use cash every day need cash occasionally or when systems go offline.

"Many bank branches are being closed despite continuing heavy foot traffic and even growing numbers of customers."

Not everyone is doing it as tough as the average battler. The world's richest tycoons are continuing to trade places on Bloomberg's billionaire index.

If you like how quickly Amazon delivers items to your home, turns out you can thank author J.K. Rowling and her beloved Harry Potter book series.

The Harry Potter books were such a phenomenon with readers the massive volume of sales ended up causing gridlock inside Amazon's giant warehouses, forcing an entire efficiency rethink over how the company stores goods.

Before the 2003 release of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Amazon had always stored books inside its warehouses under the author's surname, just like a book store would, such as Stephen King under K and Roald Dahl in the D's.

But frenzied pre-release sales of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix led to traffic jams of pickers – the name for workers who walk the warehouse collecting goods to be shipped – in the R section.

With so many pickers descending on one spot, the queues in warehouses messed up the picking schedule and slowed down the crucial first step in Amazon's delivery operation.

So Amazon threw the alphabetical stow system in the bin and moved to what the online retail giant calls "random stow", a model it has used inside its vast fulfilment centres for the past 20 years.

Random stow is a kind of organised chaos, where goods are scattered randomly throughout a warehouse: a beach towel can sit on a shelf with batteries on one side and frying pans the other.

So when an order is placed online, there's a good chance one of Amazon's pickers will be in close proximity to that item.

The quicker that pickers pack, the faster an order moves out.

A small room inside the company's headquarters in Seattle nods to the special place Harry Potter has in the Amazon mindset, and how the system helped supercharge speed of delivery.

Nestled close to a lobby cafe where workers, also known as Amazonians, pick up a free daily coffee, the Harry Potter Room acts as a small library and quiet workspace.

Select passages from the books line the walls, and a variety of fiction and non-fiction titles sit on shelves.

Speed is one of Amazon's magic powers, and Australians demand "reliability and fast delivery", Akhil Saxena, Amazon's vice president of customer fulfilment operation for Asia Pacific, said.

Since launching with one fulfilment centre in Melbourne in 2017, Amazon's footprint in Australia has rapidly grown.

Over six years, the company has invested $15 billion in building out a network of fulfilment centres and transportation models.

Saxena described Australia as a "very important" market in the Asia-Pacific region.

"It's the fastest growing network that we have in terms of size, scale and also from a volume perspective," he said.

There are now 7000 employees in Australia, up from 1000 in 2017.

An under-construction fulfilment centre in North Melbourne will be the size of 11 Melbourne Cricket Grounds, the largest warehouse ever built in Australia, when complete in 2025.

"A lot of the work that we've done has been to find ways that we can deliver quicker to our customers," Saxena said.

Fulfilment centres tooled up with machine learning, artificial intelligence and robotics has been pivotal to that end, he said.

Amazon's Flex program, which uses independent drivers to make deliveries, has also been a vital part of establishing a transportation network in Australia that moves goods when traditional courier companies do not, he added.

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 man has been rushed to hospital after he was shot in the leg in Sydney's south this morning.

Emergency services found the injured man with a gunshot wound after they were called to a local shopping centre carpark in Sans Souci about 5.45am.

The 22-year-old man was treated by paramedics before being taken to hospital in a stable condition.

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A crime scene has been established by police as they continue to investigate the incident.

Police have asked any witnesses or people with information to contact CrimeStoppers.

Britney Spears wrote that she had an abortion while dating Justin Timberlake more than 20 years ago, according to a peek inside her hotly-anticipated memoir.

“If it had been left up to me alone, I never would have done it,” she writes of the procedure, according to the excerpt from “The Woman in Me” published Tuesday in People magazine. “And yet Justin was so sure that he didn’t want to be a father.”

The pregnancy “was a surprise, but for me, it wasn’t a tragedy,” she wrote in the excerpt, saying that she had wanted to start a family with Timberlake — it was just earlier than expected.

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“But Justin definitely wasn’t happy about the pregnancy. He said we weren’t ready to have a baby in our lives, that we were way too young,” she wrote. The couple broke up in 2002. It’s unclear when the pregnancy happened.

Representatives for Spears declined to offer further comment. Representatives for Timberlake did not respond to requests for comment from The Associated Press. The AP has not been able to independently review a copy of the “The Woman in Me” yet.

Spears, a prolific user of social media, has not posted to Instagram or X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, since the People stories were published.

In the excerpt published in People, she characterised the abortion as “one of the most agonizing things I have ever experienced in my life.”

Spears’ long-awaited memoir will be published October 24, just months after her divorce from Sam Asghari was announced and promising to shed light on the 41-year-old’s tumultuous decades in the spotlight.

“NO ONE KNOWS WHAT I REALLY THOUGHT … UNTIL NOW,” reads a teaser for the book she posted Sunday. The audiobook will be narrated by actor Michelle Williams.

Hailing from Kentwood, Louisiana, Spears rose to fame as a tween on “The Mickey Mouse Club,” alongside other future stars like Ryan Gosling and Timberlake — a trajectory chronicled in other excerpts published by People.

Despite some further attempts at acting — in the People excerpts, she says the lead in “The Notebook” came down to her and Rachel McAdams and that she was relieved when 2002’s “Crossroads” was “was pretty much the beginning and end of my acting career” — she found indelible stardom with her music career, starting with 1999’s “…Baby One More Time.”

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She had two sons with Kevin Federline, but was placed under a court-ordered conservatorship — mostly under the supervision of her father — that controlled her life, money and voice after public breakdowns. That conservatorship would last nearly 14 years, ending in late 2021, after a swelling #FreeBritney movement that helped secure new limits on conservatorships in California.

Many of Spears’ allegations against her father and others who operated the conservatorship are expected to be heard in a civil trial scheduled for next year.

A 2021 documentary, “Framing Britney Spears,” included an old interview in which Timberlake spoke of sleeping with a former girlfriend and indicated he ridiculed her in his “Cry Me A River” music video. That sparked a backlash in which fans accused the former NSYNC member of contributing to Spears’ breakdown and also renewed ire about his role in Janet Jackson’s so-called wardrobe malfunction during the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show. Subsequently, he apologised to Spears and Jackson “because I care for and respect these women and I know I failed.”

A few months later, as Spears revealed long-guarded secrets about what she described as an “abusive” conservatorship in court, Timberlake tweeted his support.

“After what we saw today, we should all be supporting Britney at this time,” he posted in June 2021. “Regardless of our past, good and bad, and no matter how long ago it was… what’s happening to her is just not right.”

Ukraine on Tuesday claimed to have carried out one of the most destructive attacks on Russian air assets since the beginning of the war, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy saying the assault used longer-range ballistic missiles donated by the United States.

Zelenskyy's announcement came hours after a US official revealed that the longer-range ballistic missiles sought for months by Kyiv and promised by US President Joe Biden had been delivered quietly and are in battlefield use.

Ukraine's Special Operations Forces claimed it destroyed nine Russian helicopters at two airfields in Russia-occupied regions in a nighttime attack on targets in eastern and southern Ukraine.

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It also hit military equipment, an air-defense system, ammunition warehouses and runways, a statement said. Dozens of Russian military personnel were injured in the attack codenamed Operation Dragonfly, it said.

A US official said the United States had made good on a promise by Biden to his Ukrainian counterpart last month that it would provide the Army Tactical Missile System, known as ATACMS.

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Zelenskyy offered "special thanks" to the United States for sending the ATACMS.

"Our agreements with President Biden are being implemented," Zelenskyy said in his usual evening address to the nation, saying the ATACMS "have proven themselves."

The weapons development piles pressure on the Kremlin as both sides look for battlefield advantages ahead of winter and what is shaping up as a protracted war of attrition.

While some versions of the missiles can go as far as about 300 kilometres, the official said the ones that went to Ukraine have a shorter range and carry cluster munitions, making them suitable for attacks on airfields.

The Ukrainian statement did not say how the targets were hit. Russian authorities did not comment on the report. It was not immediately possible to verify the two sides' battlefield claims.

The airfields, in the Luhansk and Berdyansk regions, are located behind the front line. The Russian military apparently thought that they were at a safe distance from Ukrainian attacks.

Meanwhile, Russia is throwing more units into its effort to take a key eastern Ukraine city, Western analysts say, after apparent setbacks that have slowed its dayslong onslaught.

The attempt to storm Avdiivka, a heavily defended city that stands in the way of Moscow's ambition of securing control of the entire Donetsk region, is Moscow's most significant offensive operation in Ukraine since the start of the year, the UK defence ministry said on Tuesday.

The Kremlin's push to claim Avdiivka comes after months of fending off Ukraine's counteroffensive, which Kyiv launched some 16 months after Russia's full-scale invasion.

The Russian forces deployed to Avdiivka are likely making slow progress and sustaining high casualties in what is proving a costly effort, the UK defence ministry said on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.

The pace of Russia's attack on the heavily fortified target has reportedly slowed in recent days since its launch last week, a Washington-based think tank said.

Russian officials made no immediate comment on developments around Avdiivka.

Citing the Ukrainian General Staff, the Institute for the Study of War said Ukrainian forces pushed back 22 Russian attacks on Monday, down from 30 reported assaults the previous day. Kyiv officials said Russia mounted up to 60 attacks per day in the middle of last week.

The Ukrainian defence ministry said Tuesday that Russia is nevertheless still attempting to encircle the city, with 10 attacks over the previous 24 hours.

The UK defence ministry said Russia's effort to overrun Avdiivka "looks increasingly unlikely in the short term."

Electric car brand BYD has announced a new model for the Australian market set to take on the Toyota Camry, while also announcing plans to bring a hybrid-electric ute to Australia with a 1000km range.

The EV market is booming in Australia, yet still accounts for less than 10 per cent of total vehicle sales. With emissions targets and strong demand that number is set to grow thanks to an ever increasing number of new models hitting the Australian market.

Chinese brand BYD is being sold in Australia through a distributor known as EVDirect, which has announced the latest model for BYD – the Seal – will be sold in Australia starting later this year starting at $49,888.

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That price puts it in the range of the most expensive Toyota Camry, and with the BYD Seal closely matching the size of the Camry it's likely to be a strong comparison.

The Seal is the first sedan for BYD in Australia and will be available in three variants, offering an entry level, long range and performance choice to buyers.

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A range of 570km is sure to put an end to those concerns from potential buyers about electric vehicle range, while the performance model's $68,798 price tag is a shot across the bow to the leader in EV sales, Tesla.

"This really is a significant moment in the Australian automotive industry," EV Direct CEO Luke Todd said.

"When I first founded EVDirect the objective was to bring the world's best electric vehicle technology to Australia and do so in an affordable manner. I'm confident we have delivered."

During the announcement of the BYD Seal, Todd also confirmed the rumoured BYD ute would be coming to Australia next year.

"Our target is to have two new models on the market each year," he told 9News.com.au.

"The next model will be a larger SUV that will be some time in the first half of next year, and then [we will sell and deliver] the highly talked about BYD ute."

The ute will not be a fully-electric vehicle, instead it will be a Hybrid (DMI Dual Motor) model, with a small 1.5 litre turbo engine alongside the battery power offering a 1000km range. A year or so later, a full electric ute will also be available.

BYD currently sells the Atto 3 and Dolphin models in Australia, with the Atto 3 the third best selling EV in Australia behind the Tesla Model 3 and Model Y.

A man who is believed to have tried to rob a muffin cafe has wound up dead on the side of the road in a regional Victorian town.

The body of the man was discovered by an early morning walker in the gutter on Bridport Street in Daylesford. 

Police said the man suffered serious injuries and died on the side of the road.

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9News understands it's believed the man had just attempted to rob a nearby cafe.

"Pretty terrifying, this gentleman has obviously just come in thinking he could get some money," a cafe employee said.

The muffin shop had only just changed hands and the new owner was working inside at the time.

"She would have been there making the food, muffins and things," the employee said.

Police are investigating the circumstances around the man's death.