65 minutes ago Father who spent 16 weeks in hospital with fractured skull home for Christmas

Scott Gold was in an induced coma for five weeks after suffering a ‘significant skull fracture’ on a night out.

Politics

73 minutes ago Desperate homeless people kicked out of pod houses by council and forced to live on the street for 'unspeakable' reason

EXCL: Residents living in the tiny pods in a council car park were told they must leave by December 18 until the new year because workers wouldn't be available for routine maintenance.

Society

78 minutes ago Rare condition sees people trigger others to sneeze and cough when they walk into a room

People Allergic To Me, or PATM, is so scarce that it doesn't even have an official medical name. However, those afflicted have come together in an online community

Politics

1 hour ago Middle East crisis: families scavenging for food scraps in Khan Younis, says Unrwa

‘Every day we see people scavenging through trash looking for food or material to burn for warmth,’ says UN agency spokespersonTurkey’s foreign minister, Hakan Fidan, has met with Syria’s de facto leader Ahmed al Sharaa - also known as Abu Mohammed al-Golan - in Damascus, Turkey’s foreign ministry has said. No further details were provided. Fidan said yesterday that Turkey will do “whatever it takes” to ensure its security if the new Syrian administration cannot address Ankara’s concerns about US-allied Kurdish groups it views as terrorist groups (see post at 10.32 for more details). Fidan also said that the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, led by al Sharaa and which swept into Damascus to topple Assad early this month, had “excellent cooperation” with Ankara in the battle against Islamic State and al-Qaeda in the past through intelligence sharing.Here are some of the latest images sent to us over the newswires from Gaza: Continue reading...

Society

2 hours ago Moment German Christmas market 'attacker' calmly drinks beer and eats shrimp hours before atrocity that left five people including boy, aged nine, dead

Appearing smiling and relaxed, this is the moment Taleb Al Abdulmohsen waltzed into a snack bar just 24 hours before his alleged killing spree which left four woman and a child dead.

Events

3 hours ago Pitch perfect: why listening to cricket on radio soothes a world that won’t hear sense

Waves crashing. Cicadas singing. And always the burble of cricket on the radio, unifying summers and people with its gentle pleasures for an uncertain worldMy father was a man of his generation, which meant when summer rolled around and the cricket season started, he insisted on muting Channel Nine’s coverage and blasting the ABC’s radio commentary instead.Ours was a complicated relationship but one thing for which I’ll be forever grateful was the way my father shared his love for Test cricket with me. I grew up as a cricket obsessive. My love for the game survived childhood, adolescence, and even the realisation that, given I was batting No 11 for South Melbourne under-12s, my dream to open the batting for Australia was unlikely to be fulfilled. Continue reading...

Politics

3 hours ago My body is already in decline. Now experts can predict when my mind will follow | Emma Beddington

What’s more depressing than the thought of a long, slow decline in health? The thought of several short, sharp declines. Thank you, science!I don’t believe ageing is linear: I reckon we have long plateaux, then everything falls apart all at once. I realised this at the close of my harrowing 31st year, when I looked in the mirror and didn’t recognise the sad, grey ghost staring back. I swear one day I was young and moderately dewy with a functioning musculoskeletal system; the next my face imploded, shortly followed by my knee (yes, it was a fun year). There’s a phrase for this kind of sudden ageing in French: prendre un coup de vieux, which feels appropriate, since I was living in France during that first precipitous decline and prolonged exposure to the angry rigours of Parisian life was at least partly to blame.Anyway, now science is catching up. Earlier this year, researchers identified two “peaks” for ageing at 44 and 60, and now a new paper points to three peaks in brain ageing...

Science

3 hours ago The family business that has told staff they only need to work four days a week

"It means people get to spend more time with their friends and families with longer weekends, they see no decrease in wages"

Economics

3 hours ago Miracle survival for people in plane crash stuck on minus 24C mountainside for three days

The two pilots and a passenger, aged 71, 68 and 25, managed to survive the minus 24C conditions after digging a hole in the snow and burning fuel from their downed An-2 aircraft

Events

3 hours ago Usyk stakes claim as best man in boxing after making Fury eat his words | Donald McRae

Boxing is full of unsavoury people but it also produces extraordinary men. The Ukrainian champion is one of themAs Oleksandr Usyk walked towards us just after three in the morning, resplendent in his purple tracksuit while carrying Eeyore under his arm, his promoter let slip a gentle cry: “Here he comes, the best man in boxing ”Alex Krassyuk is not a traditional boxing promoter, being a much more understated man than most of his contemporaries in this riotous old business. But his pride was understandable in the immediate aftermath of Usyk’s decisive second straight defeat of Tyson Fury. Continue reading...

Politics