TRANSCRIPT
Welcome to SBS News in Easy English, I'm Biwa Kwan.
The bodies of four Israeli hostages have been handed to the International Committee of the Red Cross in Gaza.
The bodies were then taken to the National Center for Forensic Medicine in Tel Aviv where they will be identified and the families notified.
It comes after the release of the last 20 living hostages in Gaza - in exchange for nearly 2,000 prisoners and detainees held in Israeli prisons.
Christian Cardon is from the International Committee of the Red Cross.
He says there is a lot of work to do over coming weeks.
"The dignity of the human remains can be respected. And also the identification of the people to make sure as soon as possible. And what we also see as top priority at the moment it is about aid coming to the people. It is very important that in addition to the emergency aid that will be in the trucks, there is also materials to allow the key actors to rebuild these infrastructures."
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Authorities say the triple zero system in Victoria is back to normal after an early morning power outage.
The outage took out the computer-aided dispatch system at around 12.30am, forcing emergency call operators to revert to pen and paper to record information.
The system was down for a number of hours before gradually coming back online.
The Victorian government says the incident is being thoroughly investigated.
But opposition leader Brad Battin says the outage is a symptom of a much larger problem with the service.
"We've seen this too often, and we saw the results and outcomes in the past. When they ended up doing a review it came up with the conclusions of how you could fix triple zero. And at the same time they're supposed to be implementing those changes, the government cut the funding."
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The Northern Territory has become the first Australian jurisdiction to ban transgender women from female prisons.
Chief Minister Lia Finocchiaro says the decision is about preserving the dignity of women.
Ms Finocchiaro has called on the other states and territories to follow her lead, saying it makes no sense to follow the current policy of classifying prisoners according to their gender identity rather than their assigned sex at birth.
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Indigenous businesses are in high demand with corporate Australia and governments.
Supply Nation says the First Nations operations they have verified recorded a $5.8 billion procurement spend within the 2024-25 financial year. That's an increase of $1.2 billion from the previous financial year.
The mining industry recorded the highest overall industry sector procurement spend, followed by construction.
Supply Nation chief executive Kate Russell says challenges remain - including lack of access to capital for Indigenous businesses owners - but she says the figures are a testament to First Nations people's resilience and skill.
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Australians are being warned to adopt better password habits for their personal and business use.
The annual cyber threat report by the Australian Signals Directorate has revealed cybercrime incidents have dropped, but businesses face a bigger financial impact from them.
The Directorate's director-general, Abigail Bradshaw, says the use of common passwords is making some businesses vulnerable - advising people to change them regularly and have multi-factor authentication on accounts.
Monash University cyber security expert Nigel Phair says he agrees that passwords are unreliable.
"I'm hoping we see the end of passwords as soon as possible. They're not a very good form of security at all. When we look at a post-quantum environment, we're seeing lots of data breaches already of information that's heavily encrypted, and once criminals work out how to decrypt that information using new technology, that will be another wave of data breaches, another wave of personal information being released onto the dark web."
That's SBS News in Easy English.
