With both international and most domestic travel still on hold, Virgin Australia is extending the status for members of its frequent flyer club again.

The airline said it will further extend Platinum, Gold and Silver Velocity memberships.

It will also start allowing members to use their rewards to book on international airline partners, which has been suspended since the borders closed in March, 2020.

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It said Velocity Platinum and Gold members who booked an eligible Virgin Australia flight by 28 March 2021 under Velocity's 2020 Status Rewards Program, will automatically get a further extension of their membership until 28 February 2023.

Velocity Platinum, Gold and Silver members with a review date between 30 September 2021 and 30 April 2022 will automatically receive an additional eight-month Status extension upon their review date, until at least 1 June 2022.

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"Many of our loyal members have earnt their highly sought-after Velocity Status memberships over many years and so we're guaranteeing that eligible members will hold onto their tier benefits with more flying opportunities on the horizon," Acting Velocity Frequent Flyer CEO, David Marr said.

"We've already given Velocity members more than 18 months of Status extensions during the course of the pandemic and our announcement today will give members even more certainty that they'll continue to enjoy the tier benefits they value when flying with Virgin Australia or our international partner airlines well into the future."

While the international border remains closed until at least December 18, Australian national airline Qantas says it wants to resume flights on that day, subject to government approval.

A home quarantine trial for seven days will start this month.

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A drawing newly attributed to Vincent van Gogh that has never been displayed publicly before is going on show at the Amsterdam museum that bears the Dutch master's name.

The "new" Van Gogh, "Study for 'Worn Out,'" from November 1882, is part of a Dutch private collection and was known to only a handful of people, including a few from the Van Gogh Museum.

The owner, who is remaining anonymous, asked the museum to determine if the unsigned drawing is by Van Gogh.

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From the style, to the materials used — a thick carpenter's pencil and coarse watercolour paper — it conforms to Van Gogh's Hague drawings, Senior Researcher Teio Meedendorp said on Thursday.

There are even traces of damage on the back linking it to the way Van Gogh used wads of starch to attach sheets of paper to drawing boards.

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"It's quite rare for a new work to be attributed to Van Gogh," the museum's director Emilie Gordenker said in a statement. "We're proud to be able to share this early drawing and its story with our visitors."

It comes from a time in the artist's career when he was working to improve his skills as a painter of people and portraits by drawing them. Over and over again.

The museum already owns the almost identical drawing, "Worn Out".

"It was quite clear that they are related," Mr Meedendorp said.

The study has been loaned to the museum and goes on show from Friday until January 2.

It shows an elderly, man sitting, hunched forwards, on a wooden chair, his balding head in his hands.

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Even the model's pants appear to conform to the English title — a patch is clearly visible on the right leg.

It is a far cry from the vibrant oil paintings of vases of sunflowers and French landscapes that eventually turned the tormented Van Gogh — after his death in 1890 — into one of the world's most famous artists, whose works have garnered astronomical prices at auction.

Instead, it illustrates how as a young artist in practicing his craft in The Hague in 1882, Van Gogh had to confront an uncomfortable truth.

"He discovered that he lacked the ability to paint people. So he was already drawing them but he liked to paint," Mr Meedendorp said.

"So in order to be able to paint people as well he went back to the drawing board."

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Van Gogh, who was famously reliant on his brother Theo's generosity throughout his life, gave the drawings an English title in a bid to build a bit of name recognition and possibly even land a job at an illustrated magazine.

"In his mind, he had an idea that he would reach out farther than Holland in the end as an artist," Mr Meedendorp said.

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The baby boom continues at Taronga Zoo in Sydney, with the park welcoming not one, but five, lion cubs.

The zoo confirmed the happy arrivals this week, noting it's the first time they've had lion cubs born on site in 18 years.

The five cubs – three females and two males – were born 12 August. They were born to experienced mum Maya and first-time dad Ato, who celebrated his fourth birthday the day the cubs arrived.

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A zoo spokesperson said the cubs are growing every day and are slowly getting used to their den.

While the park is closed to the public due to lockdown the public can catch a glimpse of the cubs on Taronga TV's cub cam.

The announcement comes just days after the zoo shared photos of three adorable meerkats born at Western Plains Zoo in Dubbo, New South Wales.

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Scientists say the hole in the Earth’s protective ozone layer over the Southern Hemisphere is larger than usual this year and already surpasses the size of Antarctica.

The European Union’s Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service said Thursday that the so-called ozone hole, which appears every year during the Southern Hemisphere spring, has grown considerably in the past week following an average start.

“Forecasts show that this year´s hole has evolved into a rather larger than usual one,” said Vincent-Henri Peuch, who heads the EU's satellite monitoring service.

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“We are looking at a quite big and potentially also deep ozone hole,” he said.

Atmospheric ozone absorbs ultraviolet light coming from the sun. Its absence means more of this high-energy radiation reaches the Earth, where it can harm living cells.

Mr Peuch noted that last year's ozone hole also started out unremarkably but then turned into one of the longest-lasting ones on record.

The Montreal Protocol, signed in 1987, led to a ban on a group of chemicals called halocarbons that were blamed for exacerbating the annual ozone hole.

Experts say that while the ozone layer is beginning to recover, it's likely to take until the 2060s for the ozone-depleting substances used in refrigerants and spray cans to completely disappear from the atmosphere.