maniacalmanicmania

Several Australian women allegedly forced to submit to invasive strip searches at Doha's Hamad airport have been given the go-ahead by the federal court to sue Qatar Airways after a "long and stressful struggle".

The five women, who cannot be legally named, were among hundreds of women alleged to have been forcibly removed from aircraft at Doha on 2 October 2020 as officials searched for the mother of a newborn found in a bathroom at the terminal.

What the fuck.

More than 6,000 hectares of seagrass meadows have been lost from Adelaide’s coastline, causing a hugely detrimental impact on local native fish populations.

As well as providing an important habitat for fish, seagrasses also help to stabilise soil and sediment on the ocean floor, helping to protect Australia’s shorelines from erosion and storms.

They also store carbon and nutrients, which helps to improve water quality and clarity – a hectare of seagrass stores 35 times more carbon than a hectare of rainforest.

Woah.

The New South Wales court of appeal has overturned the approval of the largest coalmine expansion in the state after a community environment group successfully argued the planning commission failed to consider the impact of all of the project’s greenhouse gas emissions.

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The court found the independent planning commission was required and failed to consider the impacts of all emissions associated with the project on the local environment, including from the exported emissions – known as scope 3 emissions – when the coal is sold and burnt overseas.

The commission approved the Mount Pleasant mine expansion in 2022. The project would double the mine’s coal output to 21m tonnes per annum until 2048 and 98% of the projected emissions are scope 3 emissions.

The Denman Aberdeen Muswellbrook Scone Healthy Environment Group (DAMS HEG) unsuccessfully appealed against the decision in the land and environment court last year but the court of appeal found in the group’s favour on Thursday morning.

Wendy Wales, the group’s president, welcomed the decision and said the burning of fossil fuels was causing increasingly destructive weather events globally, including in NSW.

“Our communities are enduring increasingly terrifying climate disasters, and nature is disappearing before our very eyes. Yet our governments are continuing to throw fuel on the fire by approving massive new coal projects like MACH Energy’s Mount Pleasant,” she said.

“It shouldn’t be up to a small community group like DAMS HEG to fight this global battle, but in the absence of meaningful government action to protect us from climate harm arising from coalmines, we felt we had no choice but to stand up for our children and grandchildren, the public interest, the rule of law and nature itself,” she said.

Too right!

Australia could face international legal action over its fossil fuel production and failure to rapidly cut emissions, Vanuatu’s climate minister says, after a potentially watershed declaration by the world’s top court.

An International Court of Justice (ICJ) advisory opinion published in The Hague on Wednesday found countries had a legal obligation to take measures to prevent climate change and aim to limit global heating to 1.5C above preindustrial levels, and that high-emitting countries that failed to act could be liable to pay restitution to low-emitting countries.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) will not release statistics from the 2023-24 Survey of Income and Housing (SIH) due to data collection issues. Despite work to address these issues, the data did not meet the ABS’ high standards for official statistics and will not be released.

This decision means that the following products will not be released in 2025:

• Income and wealth, Australia
• Housing Occupancy and costs, Australia

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Results from the SIH 2025-26 are expected to be published from mid-2027.

The ABS has a range of alternative data that give insights on income, wealth and housing, including:

• Australian National Accounts: National Income, Expenditure and Product, March 2025
• Employee earnings, August 2024
• Average Weekly Earnings, Australia, November 2024
• Lending indicators, March Quarter 2025
• Consumer Price Index, Australia, March Quarter 2025 and Monthly Consumer Price Index Indicator, May 2025
• Census of Population and Housing

The Albanese government was so worried a court case could halt native forest logging in northern New South Wales that it drew up plans to essentially sidestep federal environment laws in the event of a loss, documents released under freedom of information laws (FoI) reveal.

The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, played a key role as the commonwealth and NSW governments worked to ensure some logging could continue in the face of any “adverse decision” and to manage a potentially volatile situation between loggers and environmentalists.

In the end, the planning wasn’t needed, because the government won the case.

Scientists are warning the wildlife impacts of a marine heatwave that has driven a catastrophic algal bloom off South Australia are likely to be equivalent to those from the black summer bushfires, and demand a similar response from governments.

Experts from five Australian universities say “one of the worst marine disasters in living memory” requires rapid investigation by federal and state governments to identify any at-risk species and fund emergency interventions if necessary.

In a report by the Biodiversity Council, an independent expert group founded by 11 universities, the scientists called on governments to commit to seven actions to respond to the “foreseeable and even predicted” event and to prepare for “an increasingly dangerous and unstable future”.

As expected, the federal Senate on Wednesday night established an inquiry into the disaster that has killed thousands of marine animals off SA. The Coalition senator Anne Ruston earlier accused the federal and SA governments of being too slow to act on the “significant environmental issue”, “allowing it to massively escalate into a serious ecological disaster”.