A US judge orders President Trump to remove White House ban on three media organisations; The fight to protect ancient Murujuga rock art taken to the UN; Administrator Peter V'landys elevated to a landmark dual role of rugby league governance.
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TRANSCRIPT:
- A US judge orders President Trump to remove White House ban on three media organisations.
- The fight to protect ancient Murujuga rock art taken to the UN.
- Administrator Peter V'landys elevated to a landmark dual role of rugby league governance.
A US judge has ordered President Donald Trump to restore White House access for journalists from CNN, MS NOW and Politico, saying the ban was likely unconstitutional.
US District Judge Tim Kelly has ordered the Trump administration to immediately return the outlets' press passes, and has blocked officials from enforcing the ban for 14 days.
The judge has rejected the government's claim the ban was motivated by national security concerns.
Mr Kelly issued the order in response to a lawsuit the news organisations had filed to contest the ban that was announced by President Trump last week.
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Government services minister, Katy Gallagher says the AI model in the Medicare portal hack only accessed publicly available information.
Ms Gallagher says the information the AI agent accessed is most often used by researchers and academics, who get "aggregated" data about benefits and prescribing statistics, to use in their own research.
"On the website that it accessed, the Medicare Statistics Reporting Service Portal is a standalone website. It’s public-facing, and it is not in any way related to Medicare in terms of claims, payments, and processing individual information."
Earlier, OpenAI said it has conducted an extensive review after its AI agent breached Australia's Medicare system.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese earlier condemned the company and its CEO Sam Altman for what he says was an unacceptable delay in reporting the June incident.
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Australia's unemployment rate has slightly increased by 0.2 per cent to 4.6 per cent.
The jobs data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics tracked employment for August, revealing a mixed picture.
Over the month, employment increased by 39,500 people to 14,836,600 people in seasonally adjusted terms.
Westpack Senior Economist Pat Bustamente tells SBS the rise in unemployment is largely due to more people who were not previously in the labour force looking for jobs, with 28,000 unemployed Australians in August.
"Possibly due to cost of living pressures and the need for extra income. But that really kind of, uh, dominated kind of the headlines, and we saw that supply pick up. On the demand side, it was still quite solid. So if you look at the seasonally adjusted number, there were forty thousand jobs created."
The number of people with part-time employment increased in the same period, with more than 4.5 million people now working part-time – a rise of almost 46 thousand of those roles.
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Murujuga traditional custodian Raelene Cooper has addressed the U-N in Geneva, saying the World Heritage-listed rock art in Western Australia's Pilbara region is being destroyed by emissions.
Ms Cooper is urging other countries to pressure Australia into halting more gas development in the region, and for the Federal Government to develop a rehabilitation plan for Murujuga.
"My human rights are being violated. I am watching the slow-motion cultural genocide and erasure of my history and culture. Emissions are destroying and desecrating Murujuga's sacred rock art and impacting all countries contributing to climate change globally. The Australian government continues to fail to protect the outstanding universal values of the cultural landscape."
Murujuga is home to the world's largest and most diverse collection of petroglyphs, with some that are at least 50,000 years old.
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Peter V'landys' appointment as NRL executive chairman is official, after the veteran sports administrator stepped down as Racing New South Wales Chief Executive.
V'landys confirmed on Thursday morning an end to his 22-year stint in that role.
The move will see his role in NRL grow, taking on the most powerful role in rugby league since the Super League war in the 1990s.
Since the creation of the independent Australian Rugby League Commission in 2012, no person has held the role of chairman and executive, on a full-time basis.
In a statement, the 65-year-old Greek Australian with heritage from the island of Kythera said:
"Naturally, this is a very sad day for me. I have put my heart and soul into racing for 22 years. As a team, we went from a struggling jurisdiction to a world-leading jurisdiction. I take this opportunity to thank everyone who has been in our team. I will miss them greatly, and I wish the industry every success."
With the appointment, the Australian Rugby League Commission also established a Governance Oversight Committee to ensure compliance of best practice corporate governance.






