Police have arrested 14 young people after recent commercial aggravated robberies in Auckland and Waikato. Auckland City police arrested six people after an aggravated robbery at St Lukes Mall last week, Assistant Commissioner…

Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus has unveiled the details of the federal government's proposed independent anti-corruption commission, saying he wants people who have engaged in corrupt conduct to be "afraid".

Labor made introducing a national ICAC "with teeth" an election promise and today unveiled its model for the body, which would be independent from government, be able to investigate anyone in the federal public service, and have retrospective powers.

It would also include whistleblower protections and exemptions for journalists to protect their sources, and will receive $262 million of federal funding across its first four years.

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In announcing the legislation, Dreyfus said the commission will be able to look into a wide range of corrupt conduct, adding "people should be afraid if they have engaged in corrupt activities".

"There is a very broad definition of corrupt conduct," he said.

"There is a threshold of serious or systemic corruption which will shape the way this commission undertakes its work.

"The commission should have expectations that this commission is going to get on with the job of stamping out corruption in the Australian public sector."

However, while the proposed ICAC will be able to hold public hearings, that will only happen in "extraordinary circumstances" – a higher threshold than the state and territory bodies have – and Dreyfus expects the majority will be held in private.

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"Most of its hearings will be conducted in private but where there are exceptional circumstances and the commission determines that it's in the public interest that a hearing be in public, then it's going to be in public," he said.

The legislation will be introduced by Dreyfus tomorrow before a parliamentary committee conducts an inquiry into the bill. The attorney-general said he hopes it will go to a debate in the final two weeks of parliament, which run from November 21 until December 1.

"It will go to a Joint Select Committee of both houses of the Australian parliament to conduct an inquiry, receive submissions, I hope hold some public hearings and report to the parliament on the bill and whether or not amendments are required to the bill," he said.

"We are hoping that the committee can be established tomorrow and it will be able to report in order to enable debate in the final sitting weeks of this year."

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Principles of federal government's proposed ICAC

Broad jurisdiction: The Commission will have broad jurisdiction to investigate serious or systemic corrupt conduct across the Commonwealth public sector by ministers, parliamentarians and their staff, statutory officer holders, employees of all government entities and government contractors.

Independent: The Commission will operate independent of government, with discretion to commence inquiries into serious or systemic corruption on its own initiative or in response to referrals, including from whistleblowers and the public.

Oversight: The Commission will be overseen by a statutory Parliamentary Joint Committee, empowered to require the Commission to provide information about its work.

Retrospective powers: The Commission will have the power to investigate allegations of serious or systemic corruption that occurred before or after its establishment.

Public hearings: The Commission will have the power to hold public hearings in exceptional circumstances and where it is in the public interest to do so.

Findings: The Commission will be empowered to make findings of fact, including findings of corrupt conduct, and refer findings that could constitute criminal conduct to the Australian Federal Police or the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions.

Procedural fairness: The Commission will operate with procedural fairness and its findings will be subject to judicial review.

In the ocean, where light only penetrates a couple hundred metres underwater, animals depend on sound to locate food, navigate and to communicate with each other.

But even well into the last century, humans were unaware of the soundscape beneath the waves.

Unable to hear the low frequencies that travel furthest underwater, explorers and scientists believed the ocean was a "silent world," according to French bioacoustics expert Michel André.

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"We (humans) ignored this acoustic dimension," he says.

"We contaminated the ocean with sound, without even having the first idea that this could have damaged it."

In recent decades, the ocean's depths have become noisier, with the rumble of ship engines, the intense pings of military sonar and seismic blasts used to locate oil and gas deposits.

This cacophony of human-made sound is drowning out marine life's natural chatter, and the impact is life-threatening.

Mammals such as whales have become isolated from their mates, their migration routes have been disrupted, and in some cases noise pollution has caused permanent hearing loss, which can be fatal.

"Sound is life in the ocean," says André.

"If we pollute this channel of communication… we are condemning the ocean to irreversible change."

André and other scientists believe that increased noise pollution has led to more collisions between ships and whales, as the ocean giants – which use echolocation or biological sonar to "see" objects – can struggle to locate a vessel over the constant din, while some individuals have become so deaf they cannot hear the approaching danger.

Since 2007, the International Whaling Commission has logged at least 1,200 collisions between ships and whales globally, but many more are likely to have gone unnoticed.

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Safe and quiet

Technology that uses acoustics to detect the presence of whales in shipping lanes could help to avert these collisions.

André and his team at the Laboratory of Applied Bioacoustics in Barcelona have developed software called Listen to the Deep Ocean Environment (LIDO), which monitors acoustic sources in real time and uses artificial intelligence to identify them.

In October, a two-metre-long buoy equipped with this technology and other sensors will be dropped into the Gulf of Corcovado, off the coast of Chile, an area busy with both whales and ships.

Using LIDO, it will be able to detect whales within at least a 10-kilometre radius and automatically send an alert to Chile's navy, which will in turn send a message to nearby vessels, encouraging them to change course or reduce their speed.

Ship engines make less noise at lower speeds, which makes it easier for whales to home in on their location.

The buoy will be the first of a wider network deployed as part of the Blue Boat Initiative, a program founded in 2020 by MERI Foundation, a scientific research organisation based in Chile.

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The long-term goal is to have these kinds of buoys running along the coast of South America and beyond, providing a safe passage for migrating whales and other marine species, says Sonia Español-Jiménez, MERI's executive director.

The Gulf of Corcovado was an obvious place to start.

The body of water, which stretches more than 50 kilometres between Chiloé Island and the mainland of southern Chile, is a hotspot for whales – home to nine species – and the largest feeding ground in the southern hemisphere for the endangered blue whale.

But the area is also subject to intense marine traffic, with many vessels belonging to the salmon farming industry. However, research in the US has shown that reducing ship speed is a simple and cost-effective method for avoiding collisions with whales.

In May 2021, after a run of deadly collisions on Chile's coastline, more than 60 Chilean scientists made a plea to the government to reroute ships from sensitive regions, set speed limits in certain shipping lanes and establish an alert system to warn vessel pilots.

Susannah Buchan, an associate researcher at the University of Concepción in Chile, was one of the signatories and is currently working with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) on adapting a similar acoustic alert system for Chilean waters.

WHOI technology has already deployed in the Santa Barbara Channel, off the coast of California, and off the coast of Savannah, Georgia.

While she sees "great potential in acoustic alert systems," Buchan says it is important that they are fully validated in scientific literature and by a peer-review process.

She also warns that acoustic alert systems are not a "silver bullet" that will end all ship strikes and must be complemented with other solutions such as slow-down zones.

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Understanding the ocean

The acoustic buoys deployed as part of the Blue Boat Initiative will not only work as an early warning system for vessels but will also use sensors to gather data such as water temperature, pH, and oxygen levels, which can be used to study ocean health and the impact of climate change.

They could also be used to help monitor local whale populations.

"Every whale has a unique sound," explains Español-Jiménez, and the buoy's LIDO technology can identify and classify four of the whale species found in the Corcovado Gulf from their song – humpbacks, blue whales, right whales and sei whales.

She adds that as the buoys gather more data, LIDO can be trained to identify other marine species.

Together all this data can be used to inform government policy and action on marine conservation and climate change, she says.

Technology is transforming our understanding of the ocean, says André.

"It has brought back this capacity to hear underwater and to listen to creatures underwater and understand the need for them to survive in this environment."

A pioneer in bioacoustics, André's work began in the 1990s, when he started investigating the cause of ship and whale collisions on a busy ferry route in the Canary Islands.

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His research found that whales' exposure to noise was leading to "acoustic trauma," with their inner ear receptors becoming severely damaged over time.

It was then that he had the idea to create an acoustic anti-collision system for whales, but the Blue Boat Initiative is the first time his technology will be implemented in the real world.

André would like to see it become more widespread, crossing countries and continents.

"My hope is that we can replicate this effort along the Pacific coast so we can cover the tracks of these whales up to Alaska," he says.

By providing tools to identify sources of sound and to monitor biodiversity, André believes that humans can reconnect with nature and help it recover: "If we find a way to monitor, to listen, and to understand the message from sound, then we have a way to understand the health status of the Earth".

Since the launch of the Russian satellite Sputnik in 1957, the world's smartest people have been taking great strides in the vast emptiness of the universe.

Chinese scientists have released a new radar image from the Zhurong (red star) Mars rover, which reveals sediment that suggests there was flooding on the planet millions of years ago. 

Scientific Journal Nature published the image and research, which provides new insights into the surface structure of the Utopia Planitia basin, the largest recognized impact basin on Mars and in the Solar System with an estimated diameter of 3,300 kilometres. 

The world has not seen any new ground-based data from the Utopia impact crater on Mars for over 45 years, since the United States of America's Viking 2 rover mission of 1975. 

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Researcher Ling Chen and colleagues from the Chinese Academy of Sciences presented the image, which was collected by the rover more than a kilometre from its original landing site.

The Zhurong rover discovered that the Utopia basin is segmented into multiple sub-surface layers approximately 70 metres thick in total.

Alternative models are being investigated, but research reveals that the layered structure may indicate that the basin experienced episodic flooding during the late Hesperian to Amazonian period. 

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The solar-powered rover, tasked to collect information on the climate conditions and magnetic fields of Mars, successfully landed in 2021 as part of China's first mission to the red planet. 

On the top surface of the basin lies a layer of regolith, a blanket of loose rock and dust less than 10 metres thick. 

This new image brings more evidence to the investigation of an ancient ocean on Mars, which is suggested to have dissolved into the rocks and crust of the planet over the years. 

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Images in this story may distress some readers.

An explosion in wild pig numbers in New Zealand has seen them spotted in suburban Wellington backyards and killing baby goats on nearby lifestyle blocks.

Naomi Steenkamp, who raises goats on property behind the Brooklyn wind turbine, said the increasing numbers of wild pigs this year meant they were ending up on popular walking tracks above Aro Valley, backyards in parts of western Brooklyn, and were regularly spotted at the southern landfill.

"I don't think people realise how big they are," she said after her husband shot and killed one that she thought weighed 120kg over the weekend.

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Her own kid goats had been "eaten alive" by the wild pigs.

She did not know for sure why the pig numbers had suddenly exploded, but it had been suggested that a ban on hunting during the COVID-19 lockdowns had allowed numbers to increase.

The Wellington City Council had been proactive in controlling pig numbers but the area seemed to be an "isolated pocket" of problem pigs, she said.

Council spokesperson Richard MacLean confirmed the council was aware of the problem and had a professional hunter chasing pigs, goats, and deer between Brooklyn, Karori, and the south coast.

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But the council was challenged as some of the land was privately owned and not all allowed hunters or hunting dogs on their land.

"If the Council had its way, then we'd get rid of all of these feral animals – but the terrain and the combination of land ownership is making it a tough task … we've certainly had calls over the years when the pigs start ripping up vegetable gardens in lawns in Brooklyn and Karori," MacLean said.

In August, a Brooklyn resident around the Ashton Fitchett Drive area, posted on Facebook about a pig run-in at dusk.

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"The dog was outside and started barking and howling, so I went to see why," she said.

"I opened the window and there was an enormous black pig facing up to the dog. Fortunately it ran off when I opened the window."

New Zealand Pighunting Association President Warren Petersen confirmed that first COVID-19 lockdown meant hunters could not get out and pig numbers grew.

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"I was getting phone calls from all over the North Island about the pig explosion," he said.

Petersen, who farms in north Taranaki, said pigs would target newborn goats and lambs.

"They skin them out – you get the skin with the legs and nothing else."

They were not generally a risk to people but could pose a danger if cornered.

This story originally appeared on Stuff and is republished here with permission.

Humanity has carried out a world-first planetary defence test, crashing a rocket into an asteroid spinning through space.

At about 9.15am AEST, the NASA DART rocket made contact with Dimorphos, a moonlet of the larger asteroid Didymos, at about 22,500km/h.

NASA crew monitoring the operation (from Earth, if it needs to be said) cheered as the signal from the rocket was lost at the moment of impact.

Although Dimorphos is not on a collision course with Earth – and is far too small to pose an extinction-level threat – the DART test is expected to provide invaluable data about altering the course of celestial bodies.

NASA will measure how much the asteroid's course was altered by, over the coming weeks.

Scientists expected the impact to carve out a crater, hurl streams of rocks and dirt into space and, most importantly, alter the asteroid’s orbit.

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The $325 million mission is the first attempt to shift the position of an asteroid or any other natural object in space.

“No, this is not a movie plot,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson tweeted earlier in the day. ”We’ve all seen it on movies like ‘Armageddon,’ but the real-life stakes are high,” he said in a prerecorded video.

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Launched last November, the vending machine-size DART– short for Double Asteroid Redirection Test – navigated to its target using new technology developed by Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory, the spacecraft builder and mission manager.

A mini satellite followed a few minutes behind to take photos of the impact.

The Italian Cubesat was released from DART two weeks ago.

Scientists insisted DART would not shatter Dimorphos. The spacecraft packed a scant 570 kilograms, compared with the asteroid’s five billion kilograms.

But that should be plenty to shrink its 11-hour, 55-minute orbit around Didymos.

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The impact should pare 10 minutes off that, but telescopes will need anywhere from a few days to nearly a month to verify the new orbit.

The anticipated orbital shift of 1 per cent might not sound like much, scientists noted. But they stressed it would amount to a significant change over years.

Planetary defence experts prefer nudging a threatening asteroid or comet out of the way, given enough lead time, rather than blowing it up and creating multiple pieces that could rain down on Earth.

Multiple impactors might be needed for big space rocks or a combination of impactors and so-called gravity tractors, not-yet-invented devices that would use their own gravity to pull an asteroid into a safer orbit.

“The dinosaurs didn’t have a space program to help them know what was coming, but we do,” NASA’s senior climate adviser Katherine Calvin said, referring to the mass extinction 66 million years ago believed to have been caused by a major asteroid impact, volcanic eruptions or both.

The non-profit B612 Foundation, dedicated to protecting Earth from asteroid strikes, has been pushing for impact tests like DART since its founding by astronauts and physicists 20 years ago.

Monday’s dramatic action aside, the world must do a better job of identifying the countless space rocks lurking out there, warned the foundation’s executive director, Ed Lu, a former astronaut.

Significantly less than half of the estimated 25,000 near-Earth objects in the deadly 140-metre range have been discovered, according to NASA.

And fewer than 1 per cent of the millions of smaller asteroids, capable of widespread injuries, are known.

The Vera Rubin Observatory, nearing completion in Chile by the National Science Foundation and US Energy Department, promises to revolutionise the field of asteroid discovery, Lu noted.

Finding and tracking asteroids, “That’s still the name of the game here. That’s the thing that has to happen in order to protect the Earth,” he said.

A New South Wales mother is urging parents to trust their instincts after her son was initially turned away from hospital with symptoms caused by an aggressive and undiagnosed brain tumour.

It was earlier this month when Naomi Jepson first noticed something was amiss with her six-and-a-half-year-old son, Oliver.

"Ollie was watching TV on the sofa, and he was covering one eye," Jepson said.

"I turned the TV off and I said, 'What's going on? Are you okay?'"

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Oliver told his mum he had double vision, which made her concerned enough to put him and his two younger sisters, aged four and one, into the car and drive to an optometrist.

However, the optometrist did not have any available appointments until a week later.

Jepson and the three kids were due to leave for a family holiday in Lismore the next day.

There, they would meet dad Nathan, who had been working away from home for several months as a camera operator for NBN.

Jepson decided to go ahead with the trip, but halfway through the 10-hour drive from home on the NSW Central Coast, she saw something that made her very worried. 

"I looked in the rearview mirror and I noticed that Ollie's eye had turned slightly inwards," she said.

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On the advice of her mum, Jepson called the national medical hotline, Healthdirect.

"They said I should get him straight to emergency to be checked over because it could be neurological," Jepson said.

As soon as they arrived in Lismore, Jepson took Oliver to the public hospital's emergency department, where they waited three-and-a-half hours without being seen.

"The nurse that night was beautiful, she said, 'You need to be seen by someone', but Ollie and I were just struggling to stay awake.

"So we went home and we came back first thing in the morning."

When they arrived the next morning, Jepson said she was greeted by a different staff member who told her they were likely to be waiting all day to be seen by a doctor.

"She said that it wasn't an emergency and she suggested that we go to a GP instead.

"I told her that we've been advised to come here by the (phone) healthline and she said, 'You're just going to be waiting all day.'"

Frustrated and worried, as Oliver's eye was still turned inwards, Jepson said she rang a local optometrist who agreed to see her son immediately as an emergency appointment.

"She did all the tests and said there was absolutely nothing wrong with Ollie's vision. But she said we needed to get straight back to emergency so they could check if it was neurological," Jepson said.

Armed with a referral from the optometrist, Jepson again took Oliver back to the emergency department.

A CT scan left doctors there puzzled.

"The main doctor that was in charge said that he and his team had been scratching their heads all afternoon as to what it could be and that he hadn't seen anything like it in his whole 20 years of working there," Jepson said.

"Which was scary, but I was glad that so many people were taking it seriously."

A few days later, an MRI scan revealed devastating news.

"The MRI showed that there was a big lump in the cavity near Ollie's ear. They told us it was a tumour, I've got no words for how we felt," Jepson said.

Oliver was airlifted from Lismore down to Sydney where doctors at the Westmead Children's Hospital diagnosed him with rhabdomyosarcoma, a rare brain cancer that forms in soft tissue.

The tumour's position in Oliver's brain means it is inoperable.

This week, Oliver began what is expected to be 12-18 months of chemotherapy, which will then be followed by radiation.

"The doctor said the tumour has only been there for three months … and that he has about an 80 per cent chance of survival, but they won't know if they've cured it for at least one to two years," Jepson said.

"I feel terrified and helpless, wondering what on earth the next 12 to 24 months is going to bring."

Jepson said her husband was not working at the moment so they could take turns being in hospital by Oliver's bedside and looking after their daughters.

Despite being so unwell, Jepson said Oliver had been extraordinarily brave.

"He's really been enjoying the one-on-one time with my husband and I and he's getting to play his (Nintendo) Switch and his puzzles – he has been in such high spirits."

Friends and relatives have rallied around the family, starting an online fundraiser which has so far raised almost $19,000 to help with their medical and living costs.

"The support has meant so much to us, I've got goosebumps just thinking about it and we are so thankful," she said.

Jepson said her sister had flown over from Perth to help, and the money raised by the fundraiser meant her husband would not be forced to go back to work immediately.

While the family is currently staying at Ronald McDonald House, Jepson said it was likely they would need to rent somewhere in Sydney while Oliver underwent his treatment.

Jepson said was also grateful for the advice she received when she called the Healthdirect phone line.

"Having that advice gave me the confidence to stand my ground. I hate to think what would have happened if I had waited a week to see a GP."

Oliver's story showed how important it was for parents to follow their instincts, she said. 

"Trust your gut, you know your kids best at the end of the day."

Contact reporter Emily McPherson at em********@******om.au.

A young man shot a Russian military officer at close range at an enlistment office on Monday, in an unusually bold attack reflecting resistance to the Russian leadership's efforts to mobilise hundreds of thousands of men to wage war on Ukraine.

The shooting comes after scattered arson attacks on enlistment offices and protests in Russian cities against the call-up that have resulted in at least 2000 arrests. Russia is seeking to bolster its military as its Ukraine offensive has bogged down and sapped its forces.

In the attack in the Siberian city of Ust-Ilimsk, 25-year-old local resident Ruslan Zinin walked into the enlistment office saying "no one will go to fight" and "we will all go home now", according to local media reports.

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Zinin was arrested and officials vowed tough punishment. Local authorities said the military commandant was in intensive care, without elaborating. A witness quoted by local news site said Zinin was in a room of people called up to fight. Troops from his region were scheduled to head to military bases on Tuesday.

Concerns are growing that Russia may seek to escalate the conflict — including potentially using nuclear weapons — once it completes what Ukraine and the West see as illegal referendums in parts of Ukraine under its control.

The voting, in which residents are asked whether they want their regions to become part of Russia, began last week and ends Tuesday, in conditions that are anything but free or fair.

Thousands of residents had already fled the regions amid months of incessant fighting, and images shared by those who remained have showed armed Russian troops going door-to-door to pressure Ukrainians into casting a ballot.

"Every night and day there is inevitable shelling in the Donbas, under the roar of which people are forced to vote for Russian 'peace'," Donetsk regional governor Pavlo Kirilenko said Monday.

READ MORE: Putin's mobilisation off to chaotic start

Russia is widely expected to declare the results in its favour, a step that could see Moscow annex the territory and give it the pretext to defend it as its own territory under the Russian nuclear umbrella.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Monday that no date has been set for recognising the regions as part of Russia, but it could be a question of days.

Jake Sullivan, the US national security adviser, said Russia would pay a high, if unspecified, price if it made good on veiled threats to use nuclear weapons in the conflict.

"If Russia crosses this line, there will be catastrophic consequences for Russia. The United States will respond decisively," he told NBC's Meet the Press on Sunday.

On Monday, Russian Vladimir Putin and Belarusian counterpart Alexander Lukashenko held an unannounced meeting in the southern Russian city of Sochi and said they were ready to cooperate with the West — "if they treat us with respect", Putin said.

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said Monday that Putin had told Turkey's president during their meeting in Uzbekistan last week that Moscow was ready to resume negotiations with Ukraine but had "new conditions" for a cease-fire. The minister didn't elaborate on the conditions.

READ MORE: Russia warned of 'catastrophic' consequences if it uses nuclear weapons

The Kremlin last week announced a partial mobilisation — its first since World War II — to add at least 300,000 troops to its force in Ukraine. The move, a sharp shift from Putin's previous efforts to portray the war as a limited military operation that wouldn't interfere with most Russians' lives, proved unpopular at home.

Thousands of men of fighting age flocked to airports and Russia's land border crossings in an effort to avoid being called up. Protests erupted in various parts of the country, and Russian media reported an increasing number of arson attacks on military enlistment offices, including one that hit the southern city of Uryupinsk on Monday.

Meanwhile, the first batches of Russian troops mobilised by Moscow have begun to arrive at military bases, the British military said Monday. In an online intelligence briefing, the British Defence Ministry said tens of thousands had been called up so far.

Under normal circumstances, two battalions deploy while a third remains behind to train. But in the Ukraine war, even the third battalion is deploying, weakening that training, the British Defence Ministry said.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a Facebook post Monday that the Ukrainian military is pushing efforts to take back "the entire territory of Ukraine", and has drawn up plans to counter "new types of weapons" used by Russia, without elaborating.

An overnight drone strike near the Ukrainian port of Odesa sparked a massive fire and explosion, the military said Monday. It was the latest in a series of drone attacks on the key southern city in recent days, and hit a military installation and detonated ammunition when it struck. Firefighters struggled to contain the blaze, and civilians nearby were evacuated, the Ukrainian military's southern command said.

New Russian shelling struck the area around the Zaporozhzhia nuclear power plant, according to Zelenskyy's office. Cities near the station were fired on nine times in recent hours by rocket launchers and heavy artillery.

In the town of Izium in eastern Ukraine, which Russian forces left earlier this month after a Ukrainian counteroffensive, Margaryta Tkachenko is still reeling from the battle that destroyed her home and left her family close to starvation.

With no gas, electricity, running water or internet, she said, "I can't predict what will happen next. Winter is the most frightening. We have no wood. How will we heat?"

By RNZ An Auckland couple have found their beloved dog after an intense 10-day search.Burrito, a brown poodle, went missing on a walk on September 15.Grace and Isaac Layola had set up camp in the Botanic Gardens, and organised…