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Thursday's news in under 2 minutes.

Kevin Rudd last night on ABC’s 7.30.

 

 

 

 

1. Last night on the ABC’s 7.30 Kevin Rudd gave his first extended television interview since becoming Prime Minister (again).

During the interview with the ABC’s Leigh Sales, the Prime Minister called on Tony Abbott to prove that he had the “ticker” to take him on in a policy debate.

Mr Rudd posed a direct challenge to the Opposition Leader saying: “So what I would say to Mr Abbott – you’ve been doing this for a long time, it’s time we had a properly moderated debate … on his chosen subjects.”

The new Prime Minister continued, “He’s the boxing blue. I’m the glasses-wearing kid in the library. Come on, let’s have the Australian people form a view about whether his policies actually have substance, whether they actually work, or whether they are just slogans.”

Rudd also explained his reasoning behind challenging Julia Gillard for the position of leader of the Labor Party, saying that “The Australian Labor Party and the government was on track towards a catastrophic defeat and I wasn’t about to stand idly by and see everything we worked for for the last five or six years go down the gurgler as Mr Abbott set about ripping it apart.”

2. Crowds in Egypt are celebrating after the military ousted President Mohammed Morsi. It comes after days of protests in Cairo’s Tahrir Square where protestors gathered to demand the president’s removal. The head of Egypt’s army, Gen Abdul Fattah al-Sisi made the announcement, saying that Morsi had “failed to meet the demands of the Egyptian people”.

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3. Fairfax has reported that two men in America appear to have been cured of HIV, joining only a handful of other people in the world who have overcome the deadly virus. This has increased hopes in the scientific community that eventually a cure for HIV might be found, as one of the patients received a transplant from a donor with a specific gene mutation that seems to be resistant to the virus.

4. Four teenagers in Melbourne have been arrested over the sharing of ‘sexually explicit’ images of one 16-year-old girl and two 14-year-old girls. The pictures were shared through social media. Others are being investigated in regards to the case.

Clive Palmer.

5. A small political party in South Australia, the United Party, has lodged a complaint with the Australian Electoral Commission against the Palmer United Party. They claim that the name of billionaire Clive Palmer’s party will cause confusion among voters because the names are so similar.

6. Six Australians who are prime suspects in a homicide case have been ordered to return to South American to give evidence. Sam Smith, Harrison Geier, Andrew Pilat, Hugh Hanlon, Tom Hanlon and Jessica Vo have been accused of involvement in the murder of a doorman at a hotel in Peru in 2012. They applied to give statements to police from Australia, but their application has been rejected. The group will now be required to appear next month in court, in Lima.