Four ambulances and four helicopters were sent to the scene.

Owner believes the outcome might have been different if he’d defended the hearing himself.

Police were called to the scene at about 2.45pm.

Two surfers encountered a pod of orcas off Arataki Beach on Sunday morning.

The British government has ordered an investigation into the country's “energy resilience” after an electrical substation fire shut Heathrow Airport for almost a day and raised concerns about the UK's ability to withstand disasters or attacks on critical infrastructure.

While Heathrow Airport said it was now “fully operational,” thousands of passengers remained stuck, and airlines warned that severe disruption will last for days as they scramble to relocate planes and crews and get travellers to their destinations.

Inconvenienced passengers, angry airlines and concerned politicians all want answers about how one seemingly accidental fire could shut down Europe’s busiest air hub.

READ MORE: First planes land at London's Heathrow Airport since closure

“This is a huge embarrassment for Heathrow airport. It’s a huge embarrassment for the country that a fire in one electricity substation can have such a devastating effect," said Toby Harris, a Labour Party politician who heads the National Preparedness Commission, a group that campaigns to improve resilience.

Energy Secretary Ed Miliband said he'd asked the National Energy System Operator, which oversees UK gas and electricity networks, to "urgently investigate" the fire, “to understand any wider lessons to be learned on energy resilience for critical national infrastructure."

It is expected to report initial findings within six weeks.

“The government is determined to do everything it can to prevent a repeat of what happened at Heathrow," Miliband said.

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Heathrow announced its own review, to be led by former transport secretary Ruth Kelly, a member of the airport's board.

Heathrow Chairman Paul Deighton said Kelly will look at “the robustness and execution of Heathrow’s crisis management plans, the airport’s response during the incident and how the airport recovered.”

Stalled journeys

More than 1300 flights were cancelled and some 200,000 people stranded on Friday after an overnight fire at a substation 3.2 kilometres away cut power to Heathrow, and to more than 60,000 properties.

Heathrow said on Saturday it had “added flights to today’s schedule to facilitate an extra 10,000 passengers."

British Airways, Heathrow’s biggest airline, said it expected to operate about 85 per cent of its 600 scheduled flights at the airport on Saturday.

While many passengers managed to resume stalled journeys, others remained in limbo.

Laura Fritschie from Kansas City was on vacation with her family in Ireland when she learned that her father had died. On Saturday she was stranded at Heathrow after her BA flight to Chicago was cancelled at the last minute.

“I’m very frustrated," she said. “This was my first big vacation with my kids since my husband died, and now this. So I just want to go home.”

Shutdown points to a broader problem

Residents in west London described hearing a large explosion and then seeing a fireball and clouds of smoke when the blaze ripped through the substation.

The fire was brought under control after seven hours, but the airport was shut for almost 18 hours.

A handful of flights took off and landed late on Friday.

Police said they do not consider the fire suspicious, and the London Fire Brigade said its investigation would focus on the substation's electrical distribution equipment.

Still, the huge impact of the fire left authorities facing questions about Britain’s creaking infrastructure, much of which has been privatized since the 1980s.

The centre-left Labour government has vowed to improve the UK's delay-plagued railways, its aged water system and its energy network, promising to reduce carbon emissions and increase energy independence through investment in wind and other renewable power sources.

“The last 40, 50 years we’ve tried to make services more efficient,” said Harris.

“We’ve stripped out redundancy, we’ve simplified processes.

"We’ve moved towards a sort of ‘just in time’ economy. There is an element where you have to make sure you’re available for ‘just in case.’ You have to plan for things going wrong.”

'Clear planning failure'

Heathrow is one of the world’s busiest airports for international travel, and saw 83.9 million passengers last year.

Chief executive Thomas Woldbye said he was “proud” of the way airport and airline staff had responded.

“The airport didn’t shut for days. We shut for hours,” he told the BBC.

Woldbye said Heathrow's backup power supply, designed for emergencies, worked as expected, but it wasn’t enough to run the whole airport, which uses as much energy as a small city.

“That’s how most airports operate," said Woldbye, who insisted “the same would happen in other airports" faced with a similar blaze.

But Willie Walsh, who heads aviation trade organisation IATA, said the episode “begs some serious questions.”

“How is it that critical infrastructure – of national and global importance – is totally dependent on a single power source without an alternative? If that is the case, as it seems, then it is a clear planning failure by the airport,” he said.

Walsh said “Heathrow has very little incentive to improve” because airlines, not the airport, have to pay the cost of looking after disrupted passengers.

‘No back-up plan’

Friday’s disruption was one of the most serious since the 2010 eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull volcano, which shut Europe’s airspace for days.

Passengers on about 120 flights were in the air when Friday's closure was announced and found themselves landing in different cities, and even different countries.

Mark Doherty and his wife were halfway across the Atlantic when the inflight map showed their flight from New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport to Heathrow was returning to New York.

“I was like, you’re joking,” Doherty said.

He called the situation “typical England — got no back-up plan for something happens like this. There’s no contingency plan.”

US military officials are scrambling to develop a "Golden Dome" defence system that can protect the country from long-range missile strikes and have been told by the White House that no expense will be spared in order to fulfil one of President Donald Trump's top Pentagon priorities, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter.

"Golden Dome" is the Trump administration's attempt to rebrand vague plans for developing a missile defence system akin to Israel's Iron Dome.

At a time the Pentagon is looking to cut budgets, the Trump administration has ordered military officials to ensure future funding for "Golden Dome" is reflected in new budget estimates for 2026 to 2030 – but the system itself remains undefined beyond a name, the sources said.

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"Right now, Golden Dome is, it's really an idea," one source familiar with internal discussions about the project said, adding there may be technology in the pipeline that, if ever scaled up, could apply to it, but as of now discussions are purely conceptual.

That makes projecting future costs nearly impossible, the source added, though it would likely cost billions of dollars to construct and maintain.

Trump has repeatedly insisted the US needs a missile defence program similar to Israel's Iron Dome, but the systems are orders of magnitude apart.

In practical terms, the comparison is less apples to oranges, and more apples to aircraft carriers.

Israel's Iron Dome missile defence system selectively protects populated areas from short-range threats in a country the size of New Jersey; Trump wants a space-based missile defence system capable of defending the entire United States from advanced ballistic and hypersonic missiles.

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For one thing, "Israel is tiny," the source familiar with ongoing internal discussions about the Golden Dome project said.

"So, it is 100 per cent feasible to blanket Israel in things like radars and a combination of mobile and fixed interceptors."

"How are you going to do that in the United States? You can't do it just at the borders and the shoreline, because intercontinental ballistic missiles, they can re-enter the atmosphere over Kansas."

Still, Trump issued an executive order during his first week in office ordering Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth to submit a plan for developing and implementing the next-generation missile defence shield by March 28.

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And a senior Pentagon official insisted earlier this week that work is underway.

"Consistent with protecting the homeland and per President Trump's [executive order], we're working with the industrial base and [through] supply chain challenges associated with standing up the Golden Dome," Steven J. Morani, currently performing the duties of undersecretary of defence for acquisition and sustainment said this week at the McAleese Defence Programs Conference in Washington.

At the same time, Pentagon officials have been realigning the Defence Department's 2026 budget proposal to meet Hegseth's priorities, which were outlined in a memo delivered to senior leaders last week and represents a major overhaul of the military's strategic goals, according to a copy obtained by CNN.

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The memo specifically directs Pentagon leadership to focus on strengthening missile defence of the US homeland through Trump's "Golden Dome."

"There is a rigorous analytic process underway taking a relook at [the budget]," Morani added. "This is standard practice for any new administration that takes office."

But it remains unclear how much money the Pentagon will request for Trump's Golden Dome in its budget proposal or how officials will determine the amount of funding is required.

Retired Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery believes creating a ballistic missile defence system may be possible in seven-10 years, but even then, it will have severe limitations, potentially capable of protecting only critical federal buildings and major cities.

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"The more you want it closer to 100 per cent, the more expensive it's going to get," said Montgomery, the senior director of the Center On Cyber and Technology Innovation at the Foundation for Defence of Democracies.

A comprehensive system will require different sets of satellites for communication, sensing incoming missiles, and launching interceptors, Montgomery told CNN.

Those types of systems are long-term projects, he said, requiring existing defences to fill the gap in the meantime.

"You've gotta be responsible here," Montgomery said. "You're not going to be able to defend everything with these ground-based missiles.

"They defend a circle around them, but it's not large."

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Potential pay day for arms companies

US arms manufacturers are already seeing dollar signs.

The Missile Defence Agency held an Industry Day in mid-February to solicit bids from companies interested in helping to plan and build Golden Dome.

The agency received more than 360 secret and unclassified abstracts about ideas for how to plan and execute the system.

Lockheed Martin has taken it a step further, creating a polished website for Golden Dome claiming the world's largest defence contractor has the "proven, mission-tested capabilities and track record of integration to bring this effort to life."

In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan announced the Strategic Defence Initiative to create a space-based defence against ballistic nuclear missiles.

The system was derisively nicknamed "Star Wars," and consumed tens of billions of dollars before it was ultimately cancelled, facing insurmountable technical and economic hurdles.

Laura Grego, a Senior Research Director of the Global Security Program at the Union for Concerned Scientists, says the same challenges remain and have been known for years.

"It has been long understood that defending against a sophisticated nuclear arsenal is technically and economically unfeasible," Grego told CNN.

America's current ballistic missile defence is designed to thwart a small number of missiles from a rogue state such as North Korea or Iran.

The system relies on the Ground-based Midcourse Defence (GMD), which has failed nearly half of its tests, according to the Arms Control Association, rendering it incapable of stopping a major attack from Russia or China.

But in his executive order, Trump called for a far more complex and robust system – space-based interceptors capable of downing a target moments after it launches.

Such a system would require thousands of interceptors in low-earth orbit to intercept even a single North Korean missile launch, according to the American Physical Society (APS), which has studied the feasibility of ballistic missile defences for years.

A single interceptor in orbit is almost never at the right place and time to rapidly intercept a ballistic missile launch, so you need exponentially more to ensure adequate coverage.

"We estimate that a constellation of about 16,000 interceptors would be needed to attempt to counter a rapid salvo of ten solid-propellant ICBMs like the [North Korean] Hwasong-18," the APS wrote in a study earlier this month.

Even then, Grego says a space-based missile defence system is vulnerable to enemy anti-satellite attacks from far less expensive ground-based systems.

"The most critical weakness of a system like this is its brittleness, its vulnerability to attack," Grego added.

In the Red Sea, the US has fired scores of multi-million dollar interceptor missiles at Houthi drones and missiles that cost a fraction of the price.

The fiscal imbalance gets far worse when the system is in space, according to John Tierney, a former Democratic congressman who held years of hearings on ballistic missile defence.

"It's a joke. It's basically a scam," Tierney said bluntly.

Now the executive director for the Center for Arms Control & Non-Proliferation, Tierney ripped Trump for being "willing to throw billions and billions and billions of dollars at something that won't work."

Adversaries likely to react

As the US pours money into research and developing the Golden Dome, current and former officials say America's adversaries will likely expand their own arsenal of ballistic missiles in an effort to stay ahead.

But since the offensive ballistic missiles are far less expensive than the interceptors needed to stop them, Tierney says the system quickly becomes financially unfeasible.

US military officials are also assessing how Golden Dome could disrupt the current stability provided by nuclear deterrence, according to the source familiar with internal planning discussions related to the project.

Today, the main US deterrent against another country launching a pre-emptive nuclear attack is its survivable second strike, or ability to retaliate even after enduring an initial nuclear attack, the source said.

"If you implement something that your nuclear armed adversaries believe is a reliable countermeasure that just nullifies their nuclear arsenal, now you've done away with deterrent stability, because you've improved the ease of the United States sending a nuclear attack to them with impunity," the source added.

"And then you have to ask yourself, well, how much do we trust the US not to do that?"

"If I'm China, if I'm Russia, my confidence is lower and lower, that that the US won't strike us with a nuclear missile in in a crisis," according to the same source.

"Strategically, it doesn't make any sense. Technically, it doesn't make any sense. Economically it doesn't make any sense," Tierney added.

A large fire has broken out at the EPCOT theme park at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida.

The blaze sent crowds of people fleeing as thick plumes of smoke were seen in the air near the park's French Pavilion.

Disney World told local media the fire started on Saturday afternoon (local time) after a walk-in cooler caught fire.

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Guests had to be evacuated from the Remy's Ratatouille Adventure ride.

No injuries have been reported.

Disney confirmed the fire had been extinguished by around 7.20pm local time.

Social media footage of the blaze shows dark smoke billowing into the sky.

Epcot is a theme park located at the Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, one of four parks at the resort.

It has now shut as normal following the fire, which broke out around two hours before closing time.

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Three popular Oxford Street institutions could be heritage listed to recognise and preserve their LGBTQIA+ ties and history.

A small slice of Sydney real estate is up for grabs for the cool price of $60,000 – but there's a catch.

The triangle-shaped block of land at 9 Anderson Street in Neutral Bay, on Sydney's Lower North Shore, is up for sale and it costs less than most house deposits.

But the land is only 31sqm, roughly the size of a tiny home or small apartment.

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Despite its size, the block of land is in one of Sydney's most desirable suburbs with the Harbour Bridge right around the corner and a tennis court sitting behind it.

The price guide of $60,000 is significantly cheaper than the average cost of a property in Neutral Bay, which is around $3 million.

However, there is a big downside – the parcel of land has an electrical transformer box out the front.

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The property is on the market with BresicWhitney.

"Formerly an easement/access site, it now offers untapped potential – whether as an acquisition for immediate neighbours or something more ambitious," the listing for each property reads.

"We're expecting good buyer interest and that it to mainly be shown from neighbours, locals and individuals seeking a unique property investment or value-add, that likely won't be available again for some time."

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Seven Australian universities are facing large cuts to research funding from the Trump administration amid its broader cuts across the global university sector, the Department of Education has confirmed.

US government funding for the Australian National University, University of Technology Sydney, University of NSW, Monash University, Macquarie University, Darwin University, and University of Western Australia will be slashed, the department said, as part of the President's ban on DEI (diversity, equality, and inclusion) projects, grants, and programs.

Education Minister Jason Clare said that although "the US will fund the research it wants to fund", the department will continue to make the case for US-Australia collaborations as beneficial for both countries' interests.

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The cuts could total up to $600 million across universities, with the biggest losses to biomedical and clinical sciences, data obtained by AFR Weekend revealed.

Funding was paused last week after the Trump administration asked Australian academics engaged in joint-US research to explain how their projects align with its domestic and foreign policy aims in a 36-point questionnaire, raising concerns about foreign interference.

The US government stated that a wish to avoid "DEI, woke gender ideology, and the new green deal" was behind its decision to "temporarily pause" funding in a memo sent to an Australian university project published by Guardian Australia.

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The Australian National University (ANU) told staff on Tuesday that US funding to one of its grants had been cut – the only university among those affected to publicly do so, so far.

"We have had the first termination of funding from the United States," Vice Chancellor Genevieve Bell said.

"We are committed to supporting our researchers and the work we do here, in all the ways we can."

The US is Australia's largest research partner, contributing $386 million to Australian research organisations in 2024 alone, according to the Australian Academy of Science.

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The organisation is urging the Australian government to work with the US to mitigate the risks of funding cuts. 

"Australia and United States research institutions have a long history of cooperation that has helped develop new technologies and solutions to global challenges," Clare said.

"Australian universities punch above their weight in research," he added. 

"International partners want to work with our universities because they are the best."