Bruce Lehrmann has had almost half a million dollars of legal bills covered under two settlements; Three people have been killed in a University of Las Vegas shooting; And in tennis, Former Champion Caroline Wozniacki granted a wildcard for Australian Open.
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TRANSCRIPT
- Bruce Lehrmann has had almost half a million dollars of legal bills covered under two settlements;
- Three people have been killed in a University of Las Vegas shooting;
- And in tennis, former Champion Caroline Wozniacki granted a wildcard for Australian Open.
Bruce Lehrmann has had almost half a million dollars of legal bills covered under two settlements over media reports airing Brittany Higgins' rape allegations.
The details were revealed late on Wednesday as two settlement deeds were ordered to be made publicly available by the Federal Court in his ongoing defamation case against Channel 10 and Lisa Wilkinson.
The settlements - which occurred before this trial began - reveal the ABC has agreed to pay a total of $150,000 towards Lehrmann's legal costs and remove a Facebook video of a joint speech by Ms Higgins and 2021 Australian of the Year Grace Tame at the National Press Club in 2022.
The agreement also requires the ABC not to reinstate a YouTube video of the speech.
Also before the current trial, News.com.au paid $295,000 to Lehrmann to cover his legal bills, with the publisher agreeing to insert an editor's note on articles published in February 2021 regarding the Higgins' allegation.
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Deputy Liberal leader Sussan Ley has called on the Albanese government to apologise to Australians as Labor looks to detain recently released non-citizens from immigration detention who may pose a risk to community safety.
The government is not revealing how many foreigners could end up behind bars under laws to set up a preventive detention regime which passed the parliament yesterday.
A 45-year-old man became the fourth former detainee to be charged with fresh offences after he allegedly broke the curfew of his visa conditions and stole luggage from Melbourne airport.
The government has been scrambling to respond to the High Court's decision, which overturned 20-years of legal precedent to rule indefinite detention unlawful.
Attorney General Mark Dreyfus refused to apologise to Australians over the release of the detainees.
"I will not be apologising for upholding the law, I will not be apologising for pursuing the rule of law, and I will not be apologising for acting. Do not interrupt, I will not be apologising for acting in accordance with a high court decision, your question is an absurd one."
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Three people have died in a shooting on the main campus of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, the bloodshed ending with the suspect dead.
Authorities have not yet released the identity of the victims, nor whether the gunman was killed by police, or took his own life.
As the shooting started, the University sent out an alert to students to run, hide or fight.
Marco Lau is a third-year student at UNLV.
"I was just hoping to get away alive at that point because it was it was loud, like it sounds like it was right there. And when I seen the cops with their guns, I knew it was serious. And I just want to get out, you know, make it alive. That's it."
The UNLV campus, located less than 3.2 kilometres east of the Las Vegas Strip, has a student enrollment of some 25,000 undergraduates and 8,000 post-graduates and doctoral candidates.
Las Vegas previously suffered America's most deadly mass shooting in October of 2017 when a gunman opened fire from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel onto a crowd of concertgoers below, killing 60 and injuring more than 850 others.
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Former champion Caroline Wozniacki has been awarded a wildcard for the Australian Tennis Open but British star Emma Raducanu has missed out on the initial batch.
Raducanu has a protected ranking of 103 due to her lengthy absence from the tour following operations on both wrists and one ankle - but that is not currently high enough to secure entry to next month's grand slam tournament.
The 21-year-old's status as a former slam champion and one of the most high-profile female players in the sport counts in her favour but most wildcards usually go to home players.
If Raducanu is not given a wildcard, and there are not sufficient withdrawals among higher-ranked players to secure her place, she will have to go through qualifying.
She is no stranger to that - that was her entry to the US Open in 2021 where she sensationally triumphed.
