OPINION: It’s about time small businesses got a little louder and fought back.

Hong Kong's deadliest fire in decades has raised questions about corruption and negligence in the renovations of the apartment complex where at least 128 people died.

An intense fire broke out at Wang Fuk Court complex in Hong Kong's northern suburbs on Wednesday afternoon, with flames covering seven of the eight towers.

The complex was home to some 4,800 residents, some of whom had raised safety concerns about the renovations more than year before the fire.

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Police on Wednesday arrested three men from a construction company on suspicion of manslaughter and gross negligence.

They were released on bail but then arrested by the Independent Commission Against Corruption, the authority said on Saturday night, pointing to their leadership role in the renovations.

ICAC had also previously arrested seven men and one woman associated with the project.

Police have not identified the company where the suspects worked, but documents posted to the homeowners association’s website showed that the Prestige Construction & Engineering Company was in charge of renovations.

Police have seized boxes of documents from the company, where phones rang unanswered on Thursday.

Officials also said they were investigating the materials used, both the netting on the scaffolding and the foam panels covering windows, and their role in the blaze.

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Residents found safety issues a year before fire

For almost a year, some residents at the Wang Fuk Court complex had been raising safety concerns to Hong Kong authorities about the scaffolding materials being used in the renovation project, according to documents reviewed by the AP, specifically about the netting that covered the scaffolding.

Hong Kong’s labor department in a statement on Saturday confirmed it had received such complaints, adding that officials had carried out 16 inspections of Wang Fuk Court’s renovation project since July 2024, and had warned contractors multiple times in writing that they must ensure they met fire safety requirements.

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The city even carried out an inspection as late as one week before the fire.

The labor department said it had reviewed the product quality certificate of the netting and that it was in line with standards, but that the safety netting had not been the previous target of inspections.

Preliminary investigations showed the fire started on a lower-level scaffolding net of one of the buildings.

It then spread rapidly as the foam panels caught fire, said Chris Tang, the city's secretary for security.

Police also said they had been looking at the highly flammable foam panels.

“The blaze ignited the foam panels, causing the glass to shatter and leading to a swift intensification of the fire and its spread into the interior spaces,” Tang said.

The labor department said later on Saturday that three prosecutions were brought against the company over breaches of safety regulations for working at height in the construction and convictions in two of the cases resulted in fines of totaling 30,000 Hong Kong dollars ($5800).

The company also was fined three times in 2023 for separate violations unrelated to the Tai Po project.

First responders also found that some fire alarms in the complex, which housed many older people, did not sound when tested, said Andy Yeung, the director of Hong Kong Fire Services. He did not specify how many were not working or if any of the others were.

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Intense blaze took days to put out

It took firefighters a day to bring the fire under control, and it was not fully extinguished until Friday morning — some 40 hours after it started.

Crews prioritized apartments from which they had received emergency calls during the blaze but were unable to reach in the hours that the fire burned out of control, Derek Armstrong Chan, a deputy director of Hong Kong Fire Services, told reporters.

Twelve firefighters were among the 79 people injured in the blaze, and one firefighter was killed.

Even two days after the fire began, smoke continued to drift out of the charred skeletons of the buildings from the occasional flare-up.

More bodies may be found

While more bodies might be recovered, authorities said, crews have finished their search for anyone living trapped inside.

Authorities said on Saturday they need to identify 44 more bodies out of the 128 recovered. About 150 people remain unaccounted for.

The dead included two Indonesian migrant workers, the Indonesian foreign ministry said Thursday.

About 11 other migrants from the country who were working as domestic helpers in the apartment complex remain missing, Indonesian Consul General Yul Edison said on Friday.

Near the site of the fire, Sara Yu held the hand of her two-year-old son, Dominic, as they each placed a single white rose into a growing cluster of the flowers in a small children’s playground.

“I brought the kids here because I want them to understand that living in this world is something to be cherished,” she said, holding back tears.

Outside a building close to the scene of the fire where family members came to identify loved ones from photographs, people placed bouquets of white roses, lilies and carnations.

“More than 128 innocent lives, what did they do wrong?” asked a sign placed among the flowers.

The city lowered flags to half staff in mourning, and Chief Executive John Lee, led a three-minute silence on Saturday from the government headquarters with officials all dressed in black.

The fire was the deadliest in Hong Kong in decades. A 1996 fire in a commercial building in Kowloon killed 41 people.

A warehouse fire in 1948 killed 176 people, according to the South China Morning Post.

ChatGPT is about to get a lot hornier. Sam Altman, chief executive of the artificial intelligence chatbot's parent company, says it's about allowing adults more freedom to use AI how they want.

But experts from a range of fields, including OpenAI's own wellbeing panel, have raised a range of concerns about what it will mean for mental health and child safety.

ChatGPT is set to enable "erotica for verified adults" next month but there are still plenty of questions about what exactly that means and what the consequences might be.

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What is 'erotic mode'?

It's not clear exactly what OpenAI is planning here. Altman said it would be rolling out age restrictions to allow the ChatGPT to do "even more, like erotica for verified adults". 

He pitched it less as a specific "erotic mode" than as a way of granting more freedom in the company's "treat adult users like adults" principle.

That leaves the door open for a lot of possibilities. It's not known if the changes will allow the model to write erotic fiction, engage in back-and-forth sexual conversations or even create an entire persona users could effectively "sext" with. 

OpenAI didn't respond to questions about what the changes would be like beyond referring to Altman's X posts announcing the feature and stressing the importance of teen wellbeing.

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Why the change? 

Put simply, people want it. A 2024 Washington Post analysis of almost 200,000 English-language conversations with AI chatbots found more than 7 per cent of conversations were about sex. 

A Harvard Business Review piece from April this year analysing Reddit posts and online articles didn't specifically delve into erotic but found therapy and companionship – "ongoing social and emotional connection, sometimes with a romantic dimension" – was the number one use case for generative AI. 

Altman says it's all about allowing users more freedom.

Senior lecturer in Computing and ​Information at Cardiff Metropolitan University Simon Thorne suggests there's another motive: profit.

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"This is a significant departure from what they have been doing, which is mostly attempting to keep what they might view as harmful information away from the user," he tells 9news.com.au

"Whether it's about erotic or of a sexual nature, or whether it's making a pipe bomb, or whatever it might be, there's obvious, obvious things that you don't necessarily want your platform to be responsible for providing. 

"So this is obviously a big change. I would suggest that, you know, this is because they are losing huge amounts of money."

So what's the problem?

Tech figures, mental health experts, a former OpenAI product safety lead and a member of the company's "Expert Council on Well-Being and AI" have all raised concerns about the announcement. 

They range from difficulties keeping children away to worries about mental health – already a concern for heavy users without introducing erotica – and driving users towards increasingly extreme sexual fantasies.

AI researcher Steven Adler, who led product safety at OpenAI, wrote an op-ed for The New York Times saying he didn't trust his former boss Altman's claims the company had "been able to mitigate the serious mental health issues" and relax restrictions.

"If the company really has strong reason to believe it's ready to bring back erotica on its platforms, it should show its work," he said, pointing to a lawsuit claiming ChatGPT helped a 16-year-old boy suicide.

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"AI is increasingly becoming a dominant part of our lives, and so are the technology's risks that threaten users' lives."

Professor Munmun De Choudhury, a computer scientist who's been exploring how generative AI and other emerging technologies transform how people connect online, is a member of OpenAI's Expert Council on Well-Being and AI.

She tells 9news.com.au she hadn't been consulted on the erotica rollout, which was announced the day after the council.

She says Altman's claims about mitigating mental health concerns lacked transparency and independent evidence.

"Mental health vulnerabilities in AI interactions are not issues that can be fully 'mitigated' through technical fixes alone – they require ongoing oversight, transparency, and validation by experts in psychology and digital safety," she says.

Won't somebody please think of the children?

OpenAI stresses this feature will only be for adults, saying it's building an age prediction system to understand whether someone is under 18 or not.

It says if the system is unsure, it will default back to the under-18 experience and give adults other ways to prove their age.

But there are major concerns with the effectiveness of existing age-gating and age-prediction tech and OpenAI's version hasn't been seen publicly.

Thorne says the recent introduction of the Online Safety Act in the UK, which imposes similar restrictions on a range of sites, shows how easily the systems can be fooled, sometimes with something as simple as a printed photo of an older person.

"Do I think they care? Not particularly, no," he says.

"They're going to, I think, say, 'Look, we've done our bit. We've put the kind of age control up front.

"Unless somebody makes them care."

De Choudhury says robust age verification and clear opt-in consent are among several "non-negotiable guardrails" OpenAI must implement.

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Are there concerns for adults?

Even if OpenAI manages to block children, there are worries about what the widespread availability of AI-generated erotica on tap could mean for consenting adults too. 

In a world of essentially unlimited internet pornography – and associated addiction risks – on the surface it's hard to make an argument that allowing people to use a chatbot for erotica could pose much of a problem.

But Thorne and De Choudhury both raise concerns with the interactivity of AI systems and their capacity for reinforcing or heightening ideas.

Thorne says while pornography or human-designed erotic literature is relatively "static", a chatbot is "very specific to the individual".

De Choudhury says allowing erotic interactions with chatbots risks deepening parasocial or dependency-based "relationships" that already pose mental health concerns.

"When intimacy and sexual expression are introduced, users may form stronger emotional attachments to an entity that cannot reciprocate or maintain boundaries in human terms," she says.

"This can distort expectations of real relationships, exacerbate loneliness, and even discourage people from seeking human connection or professional help."

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What happens if my naughty chat leaks?

Privacy is another huge issue. Thorne says the change will give OpenAI a "very detailed data set, probably the likes of which have never been seen before".

"If that information gets into the wrong hands, you know it could be extremely damaging to people, and also, you know it can be exploited to target people even more individually.

De Choudhury says strong data privacy and non-retention policies must govern all sexual or intimate exchanges to prevent misuse or leaks.

How does OpenAI say it's safe? 

Altman insists the planned change is safe and characterises it as just one aspect of increased freedom he wants to give users, saying "allowing a lot of freedom for people to use AI in the ways that they want is an important part of our mission".

"We are making a decision to prioritise safety over privacy and freedom for teenagers. And we are not loosening any policies related to mental health," he posted to X in October. 

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"This is a new and powerful technology, and we believe minors need significant protection."

He insists nothing that causes harm to others will be allowed and that ChatGPT will be able to behave differently for users experiencing "mental health crises".

"Without being paternalistic we will attempt to help users achieve their long-term goals," he said. "But we are not the elected moral police of the world. In the same way that society differentiates other appropriate boundaries (R-rated movies, for example) we want to do a similar thing here."

OpenAI says teen wellbeing is a top priority.

"We have safeguards in place today, such as surfacing crisis hotlines, guiding how our models respond to sensitive requests, and nudging for breaks during long sessions, and we're continuing to strengthen them," a spokesperson tells 9news.com.au.

"We recently rolled out parental controls, developed with expert input, so families can decide what works best in their homes, and we're building toward a long-term age-prediction system to help tailor experiences appropriately."

Has this been done before?

There are a slew of AI companies offering erotica and erotic functions in everything from text-based stories and personas to images and video, and there are widespread reports among users that ChatGPT would generate erotica with minimal effort as recently as this year. 

My Spicy Vanilla founder Andrei Tolocica says his platform started by generating date night ideas before pivoting to AI erotica, and now counts about 60,000 monthly users, including couples therapists.

"Women love reading erotica, but now also men start to read erotica," he tells 9news.com.au.

"And this is something nice that is happening, and people are getting used to it, because they understand that porn can be damaging for them and when we're speaking about erotica, it's just in your imagination, like you can be getting into it smoother, and it's not that aggressive on your mind. 

"And plus, when they are generating custom erotica with their partner, it's again, like, strengthens their relationship."

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Melbourne's Metro Tunnel has opened to passengers this morning, albeit with some minor hiccups.

The project, which cost $15 billion and has been hampered by delays and setbacks, added five new stations, with the first trains hitting the rails just after 9am.

Melburnians have flocked to try out the extension with massive crowds at all stations, though some delays and minor issues have been experienced.

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There were delays of up to 15 minutes after a fire alarm went off near Anzac Station, forcing trains to remain idle, though those delays are clearing according to Metro Trains' official website.

There has also been escalator outages at Parkville Station and State Library Station, according to The Age.

The other new stations opening today are Town Hall and Arden, with the new line running for almost 100 kilometres.

It represents the biggest upgrade to Melbourne's rail in 40 years, doubling the size of the city's underground rail network and will ease congestion on the city loop.

It is a project that has been years in the making, with tunnelling beginning in 2019.

Boring machines were digging as deep as 40 metres underneath Melbourne to create the tunnels, the most striking of which are two twin tunnels that run for nine kilometres.

The opening is not without controversy, with the firefighters union wanting to delay it due to claims about dangerous radio faults within the new network.

Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan claimed it was a scare tactic to try and secure better pay, rather than publicising any actual safety concerns.

"The claims that have been made by the union today are wrong and they've also been clearly rejected by the rail safety regulator, who is the expert on this matter," Allan said.

"These claims are being made perhaps more for industrial purposes than anything else."

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President Donald Trump on Saturday said that the airspace “above and surrounding” Venezuela should be considered as “closed in its entirety,” an assertion that raised more questions about the US pressure on Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro.

His government accused Trump of making a ”colonial threat" and seeking to undermine the South American country's sovereignty.

The White House did not respond to questions about what Trump posted on his Truth Social platform, and it was unclear whether he was announcing a new policy or simply reinforcing the messaging around his campaign against Maduro, which has involved multiple strikes in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean on small boats accused of ferrying drugs as well as a buildup of naval forces in the region.

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More than 80 people have been killed in such strikes since early September.

The Republican president addressed his call for an aerial blockade to “Airlines, Pilots, Drug Dealers, and Human Traffickers,” rather than to Maduro.

Venezuela’s government said it “forcefully rejects” Trump’s claim about closing the airspace and that it was a “colonial threat” intended to undermine the country's "territorial integrity, aeronautical security and full sovereignty.”

The Foreign Ministry said “such declarations constitute a hostile, unilateral and arbitrary act.”

The statement also said that US immigration authorities had unilaterally suspended biweekly deportation flights of Venezuelan migrants.

Following negotiations between the two governments, more than 13,000 Venezuelans have been deported to Venezuela this year on dozens of chartered flights, the latest of which arrived late Friday in Caracas, the capital, according to flight-tracking data.

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International airlines last week began to cancel flights to Venezuela after the Federal Aviation Administration told pilots to be cautious flying around the country because of heightened military activity.

The FAA’s jurisdiction is generally limited to the United States and its territories.

The agency does routinely warn pilots about the dangers of flying over areas with ongoing conflicts or military activity around the globe, as it did earlier this month with Venezuela.

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The FAA works with other countries and the International Civil Aviation Organization on international issues.

The FAA and ICAO did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Saturday.

Trump's administration has sought to ratchet up pressure on Maduro.

The US government does not view Maduro as the legitimate leader of the oil-rich but increasingly impoverished South American nation and he faces charges of narcoterrorism in the US.

US forces have conducted bomber flights near Venezuela and the USS Gerald R. Ford, America's most advanced aircraft carrier, was sent to the area.

The Ford rounds off the largest buildup of US firepower in the region in generations. With its arrival, the “Operation Southern Spear” mission includes nearly a dozen Navy ships and about 12,000 sailors and Marines.

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There are bipartisan calls for greater oversight of the US military strikes against vessels in the region after The Washington Post reported that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued a verbal order for all crew members to be killed as part of the Sept. 2 attack on suspected drug smugglers.

Republican Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and its top Democrat, Rhode Island Sen. Jack Reed, said in a joint statement late on Friday that the committee "will be conducting vigorous oversight to determine the facts related to these circumstances.”

Trump’s team has weighed both military and nonmilitary options with Venezuela, including covert action by the CIA.

Trump has publicly floated the idea of talking to Maduro.

The New York Times reported on Friday that Trump and Maduro had spoken.

The White House declined to answer questions about the conversation.

About 200 firefighters tackled a massive factory fire in Sydney's west, with authorities warning it could burn for days.

Emergency services were called to a waste management business in Kurrajong Street, North St Marys at about 10.50pm last night.

Explosions were heard as the blaze began, with some being felt several kilometres away in Penrith.

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A fireball was seen high above the site, reaching 150 metres into the air.

Concrete blocks were sent flying 150 metres into the air and locals were told to keep windows and doors closed.

The fire could still burn for several days, as hazardous materials at the business, a recycling centre, is feeding the inferno.

Two firefighters were treated at the scene for minor burns, with fire crews being praised for their valiant efforts to contain the raging fire.

"There's been some amazing firefighting going on," Fire Commissioner Jeremy Fewtrell said. 

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"We've had an incredibly large explosion, and so luckily all of our firefighters were able to be safe through that."

Large chunks of rock were thrown into the air in the initial explosion, hindering initial efforts to combat the massive blaze.

Explosions had continued throughout the morning, with locals warned to avoid the area and to keep their windows closed, as smoke continues to billow from the fire.

Drones with air monitoring devices were deployed giving fire crews eyes in the sky mapping out where the toxic fumes had spread.

Whilst the cause of the fire remains unknown at this stage, police are conducting their own investigations.

A 200 metre exclusion zone has been put in place, with motorists urged to avoid the area.

Firefighting has now been scaled back as investigations begin.

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The death toll from heavy floods and mudslides caused by Cyclone Ditwah in Sri Lanka rose to 132, with 176 people still missing, authorities said.

Nearly 78,000 people have been displaced and are in temporary shelters, the South Asian country's disaster management centre said.

The death toll is expected to rise. Social media posts on Saturday showed several areas affected by overnight mudslides that authorities have yet to reach.

READ MORE: Massive industrial fire in Sydney's west could burn for days

Sri Lanka has been battered by severe weather since last week. Conditions worsened Thursday, with heavy downpours that flooded homes, fields and roads and triggered landslides mainly in the tea-growing central hill country.

The government closed schools and offices and postponed examinations.

Most reservoirs and rivers have overflowed, blocking roads. Authorities stopped passenger trains and closed roads in many parts of the country after rocks, mud and trees fell on roads and railway tracks.

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By Friday, water flowing downstream from severely affected areas began to inundate areas around the capital, Colombo, which experienced comparatively less rainfall.

Authorities say that Ditwah, which developed in the seas east of Sri Lanka, is likely to move toward India's southern coast by Sunday.

Neighbouring India dispatched two search and rescue teams, comprising 80 rescuers, and sent aid to support ongoing operations, the country's embassy in Colombo said Saturday.

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It was just after 3pm when William Li received the unusual call from his wife, who was at work, saying she'd heard from a friend that their building was on fire.

There were no alarms, no signs of smoke in his 2nd floor apartment, and no burning smell to give a sense of urgency, so the 40-year-old office worker who was home on a day off decided to change from his pajamas before heading outside.

But when he opened his door eight minutes after his wife called, it was already too late to escape as he was immediately engulfed by thick, black smoke.

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"Everything went black before my eyes," he told The Associated Press. "I thought to myself: I'm in serious trouble."

That was just the beginning of Wednesday's blaze at the Wang Fuk Court complex on the outskirts of Hong Kong. It would burn for more than 40 hours and engulf seven of the complex's eight buildings before being finally extinguished on Friday morning, claiming the lives of at least 128 people with dozens unaccounted for, making it Hong Kong's deadliest fire since 1948.

Fire spread through scaffolding

From Li's apartment near ground zero where the fire broke out, the flames shot up bamboo scaffolding covered with nylon netting that had been erected for construction work. It ignited polystyrene panels that had been placed over windows and blew out the glass, allowing the blaze to spread inside. Winds helped the fire jump from building to building.

Authorities are investigating whether the netting covering the bamboo scaffolding, commonly used in Hong Kong and elsewhere in Asia, met fire-safety requirements; why windows were covered with foam panels; and why fire alarms did not sound.

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Already police have arrested three people — the directors of a construction company and an engineering consultant — and Hong Kong's anti-corruption authorities have arrested a further eight including scaffolding subcontractors, directors of an engineering consulting company and the renovation project managers.

The complex is in Tai Po, a market town that in the late 1970s was designated as a "new town", with many high-rise apartments built. The district is now home to about 300,000 of the city's 7.5 million population, a mix of affluent, middle-class and lower-income groups.

A quiet neighbourhood amid Hong Kong's bustle

Li grew up in the Wang Fuk Court complex, while resident Ding Chan and her husband moved there as adults as soon as it was built in the early 1980s, lured by the appeal of the quiet suburban neighbourhood north of Hong Kong, far away from the city's commercial centre.

Chan had left her apartment a half-hour before the fire broke out and was at work as a cleaner when she started receiving frantic calls from friends about the blaze.

"I did not believe it at first," the 70-year-old told the AP.

By the time she got back to the housing estate shortly after 3pm — about the same time Li's wife was calling him with her warning — she could see the flames already spreading quickly and it wasn't long before it reached her own building, and there was nothing she could do but watch.

"I had never seen such a massive fire in my entire lifetime," she said.

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Her husband, IN Kong, who is also 70, was also fortunately not at home when the fire broke out.

But Chan, who juggles two jobs and often works six days a week, and her husband who works as an electrician, are now faced with having to rebuild their lives from scratch.

Their unit, which they spent more than a decade paying off, is likely uninhabitable now and Chan said they did not know how they were going to survive for the next months, let alone the longer term future.

They have been put up temporarily in a local hotel, but don't know what comes next.

"I haven't slept for two nights," she said. "Where am I going to stay?"

The government has made emergency assistance available to residents, and donations have also been pouring in, but it was not yet clear what long-term financial aid those in need will receive.

Of the more than 4600 residents in Wang Fuk Court, more than one-third are over 65, like Chan and her husband, according to Midland Realty data based on the 2021 census.

Some 900 people were taken to emergency shelters in the immediate aftermath of the fire, and hundreds of volunteers, including off-duty nurses, social workers and psychological counselors, flocked to the district to offer help.

Sharing his story to help the community heal

Li took to social media to share his ordeal, posting details on Friday on a Tai Po Facebook group, writing he hoped to help the community "heal and rebuild together." By Saturday morning it had generated more than 1000 comments and had been shared nearly 10,000 times.

After being blasted by smoke when he first tried to venture into the hallway, Li quickly retreated back into his apartment.

He described hearing explosions, and a photo he snapped shows his room illuminated by the glow of flames outside the window. He told the AP he thought of jumping, but instead decided to wait for rescue.

He called police to report the predicament, put wet towels down to block smoke coming in from under his door and called his wife to tell her he couldn't get out.

"Everyone told me to wait," he said.

Hearing voices from the hall, he decided to brave the smoke and went into the corridor where he found two bewildered neighbours who were trying to escape, and led them back to shelter in his apartment.

"I asked them why they had left their own home instead of waiting inside," he said. "They told me it was because their window had overheated and shattered from the fire and the fire rushed into their home."

Seeing flames closing in, he began to worry his apartment would soon suffer the same fate.

"That was the moment I began to feel death was very close to me," he said. "I was terrified, helpless, because I knew my escape route, the doorway, was no longer safe. In that instant I felt powerless, as if there was nothing I could do except wait."

Not sure what else to do, the father of two reached out to friends for comfort.

"I started telling my friends to help take care of my family," he said. "I felt like I was facing the end of my life."

His mother, who lives in Britain, called in panic. "I could only tell her not to worry," he said.

In the end, help arrived before the flames.

About 5pm, about two hours after his wife called to warn him, firefighters got a ladder to the scaffolding outside his window.

Li told the firefighters to take his older neighbours first, helping them out the small window onto the scaffolding, which they crawled along until they reached the ladder.

"Once my two neighbours had been rescued, I was left alone in the flat," he recalled.

"At that moment my feelings were very heavy, because I knew I had to leave this home, and that it might be swallowed by the fire — I felt reluctant, but I had no choice. I had to escape."

As he climbed down the ladder, firefighters yelled at him to cover his head due to falling debris, while hosing him down with water to protect him from the flames.

"The cold water drenched my whole body and the emotions were overwhelming, hard to describe," he said. "But I felt very lucky."

Dozens of residents on higher floors of the 32-storey buildings were trapped even longer, as firefighters battled extreme heat to conduct door-to-door searches. Li said he had only moved down to the second floor in September, and said he had heard that his former neighbours on the 29th floor had all perished in the blaze.

Emotional family reunion

About two hours after getting rescued, Li finally got to see his wife, son and daughter, who had been watching the blaze from outside, in an emotional reunion.

"My wife cried until her tears were completely dry, unable to cry anymore," he said. "My daughter immediately rushed over to hug me saying, 'daddy didn't die, daddy didn't die'. My son sat quietly to the side, very calm, but tears kept streaming down his face."

Like Chan and her husband, and most other residents of the apartment complex, Li is now left wondering what will come next for him and his family even with the outpouring of support now being offered.

"No matter how many supplies are given, they are of little use — we can only carry what our two hands can hold, even if more is given we have no place to put it," he said Saturday.

"Still, I am very grateful, Hong Kong people are full of compassion, constantly helping, donating generously," he said. "At this moment, we haven't yet seen all the stuff, but I will look around and see what can help us."

A woman has been winched to safety in an overnight rescue operation after she fell eight metres into a cave in remote Western Australia.

The 60-year-old woman fell from a ladder into a cave at Empress Spring in the remote Goldfields, near Lake Wells, yesterday evening.

Crews worked through the night in challenging conditions, using specialist equipment to reach the woman.

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She was winched to safety about 5.30 this morning and taken to Laverton Hospital with non-life threatening injuries.

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Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has married long-time partner Jodie Haydon in an intimate ceremony at The Lodge attended by ministers, family and friends.