Australia

Public life ground to a halt, many lost power, and scores of people died behind closed doors. What sounds like the start of a post-apocalyptic movie is in fact Melbourne in January 2009.

Self-declared sovereign citizens, who believe Australia’s laws do not apply to them, are having a serious impact on the family court, experts say

Kind of odd to me becase even if you do believe this, the judicial institutions have armed police and jails on their side and you have your thumbprint, (unkess your name is Train I guess, which was a whole other thing) seems a losing battle from the get go? Whats the upside ?

An oppressive heatwave stretching across half the country from Darwin to Victoria will send temperatures soaring up to 15 degrees Celsius above average during the coming days.

Maximums are predicted to exceed 40C across a broad swathe of the interior and east — the warmest summer weather in years for much of south-east Australia, including highs on Monday of 41C in Melbourne and 38C in Canberra.

Across the eastern outback maximums will peak well above 45C, hot enough to challenge December records in a handful of western New South Wales towns.

I've been hearing a fair bit recently about alternate/private fibre providers (ie DGtek/PineappleNet or Gigacomm), and I'm very intrigued (especially pineapple as they offer symmetrical upload and download speeds as opposed to whatever tf the NBN is doing with this gigabit down, 20mbps up garbage.

Unfortunately all of them only have teeny tiny coverage maps, and exclusively in inner city/affluent suburbs. But if anyone here lives in one, or knows somebody that does and uses one of them, what's your experience been like?

I'm really hoping they start to rollout to more suburbs. The NBN rollout was mega bungled, and although they don't directly sell to consumers, and are a publicly owned corporation, I think it'll be nice to see more competition, or at the very least, more options. The NBN's FTTP upgrades have helped, but are limited in scope, at least for now. And still have the downside of only offering asymmetric upload speeds (which I realise isn't that big of an issue for most people, but would still be useful to see an improvement on)

I know this has been covered but this is good analysis from a high school student.

Archive/non-paywall link.