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Sunday's news in under 5 minutes.

Jude (left) and Bianka with John (right). Image from NSW Police Force’s Facebook page.

UPDATE: John O’Brien speaks out about losing his son and wife.

John O’Brien – who tragically lost his wife and his one-year-old son in last week’s convenience store explosion – has released a statement which speaks of the devastation he is now, understandably, feeling.

The statement, which was posted on the NSW Police Force’s Facebook page, stated (in part):

On Thursday morning I lost my beloved wife, Bianka, and our baby Jude. Bianka was an inspiration to all who knew her – she was loyal, caring and absolutely loved life. People gravitated towards her because of her beautiful and warm personality.

Bianka and I were together for eight years, married for two, and to say she was the love of my life is an understatement.

John goes on to explain how the proudest moment of his life was becoming a father:

Jude had just started to walk and was only just discovering the world around him. Everything was exciting to him and he was just a joy to be around.

He made everyone smile.

John also thanked the community for their support, but asked for privacy in this time of grief.

John shared a flat with Bianka and Jude above the convenience store in Rozelle; however, he left for work at 3am on Thursday morning, just an hour before fire broke out through the store and the building collapsed into rubble. Bianka and Jude’s bodies were recovered from the site, along with the body of Chris Noble, another resident who also died in the fire.

Wife of missing passenger from flight MH370 speaks out about ongoing despair.

Danica Weeks’s with her two children.

Perth mother Danica Weeks has revealed she is still grieving and searching for answers, six months after flight MH370, which her husband Paul was on, went missing.

Speaking to Anne Barrowclough from The Weekend Australian Magazine, Weeks said, “Every morning I wake up and think, “How do you lose a plane?” I can’t even begin to grieve yet.”

“Every night now I go home and it’s lonely, it’s very lonely. When you’ve had someone there for 14 years, how do you keep going when they’re gone?”

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Weeks husband Paul boarded flight MH370 on March 8th. He was flying to Mongolia to begin a fly-in-fly-out job as a mechanical engineer.

Former detention centre guard reveals what Manus Island conditions really are.

Beau Mitchell, a former detention centre guard at Manus Island, has told the ABC it was unsurprising Iranian asylum seeker Hamid Kehazaei caught a deadly infection at the centre.

Mitchell took photographs of the unhygienic conditions asylum seekers at Manus Island are subjected to, before resigning from his position in June out of disgust.

“There’s no air conditioning, the beds are extremely close together. The living standards are quite filthy,” he said.

“Often they’d be standing on concrete to have a shower that was literally falling apart beneath them, just completely rotting away.”

Australians hate changing their bedsheets.

A new survey of Australian lifestyle habits has revealed 35 per cent of adults only change their bed linen once a fortnight. One in ten revealed they didn’t wash their linen more than once a month.

YouGov asked pollsters at what point it became ‘disgusting’ to have unwashed sheets. Women on average said after five weeks, while men said after six.

The survey also revealed 18-24 year old’s were the least likely to change their sheets frequently, with only 16 per cent in this age bracket admitting to washing their sheets weekly.

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Australian and Malaysian investigators to return to MH17 crash site.

Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott and Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak have agreed to send investigators back to the MH17 crash site in Eastern Ukraine. The pair met for bilateral talks in Kuala Lumpur on Saturday.

“Malaysia demands a full independent and transparent international investigation into the incident in accordance with relevant international conventions,” Mr Razak said.


Tony Abbott reflects on first year as Prime Minister.

Prime Minister Tony Abbott has released a video to mark his first year in the job. 

On what went well he said, “the boats are stopping, our record $50b roads and infrastructure program is underway, and we’ve given environmental approval to big new projects worth over $800b.”

On what he’ll strive to improve on he said, “As a nation, we’ve also faced serious challenges in the past year because of the increasingly uncertain world in which we live. In an increasingly uncertain world, we are determined that our nation will be secure.”


French man jailed after phoning and texting his ex 21,807 times.

A French man, 33, was jailed on Thursday after harassing his ex-girlfriend with 21,807 phone calls and texts over a 10-month period. The calls averaged 73 per day.

The unnamed defendant told a court, “I tell myself, with hindsight, that it was stupid.”

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He has been fined $1380 and was given a 10-month jail sentence– six months of which have now been suspended.

Joan Rivers previously revealed heart condition and fear of anesthesia.

In 1985, Joan Rivers actually appeared on TV  show Good Morning America to explain that she suffered from a heart condition, called arrhythmia, that made her heart beat out of sync.

The actress, who was 50-years-old at the time, told GMA’s host Joan Lunden that the condition was common amongst women, but that it made her scared of going under anesthesia, saying: ““It scares the hell out of you. And when you go out, say for plastic surgeries and things like that, that’s when your heart can go out of kilter, so I’m always very careful.”

According to The Hollywood Reporter, police plan to investigate her death, as it may be deemed to have not come about from “natural causes”.

Five Australian endangered species to go back into the wild.

After a very successful breeding season at Zoos Victoria, five endangered species are set to be released back into the wild – including Tasmanian devils, orange-bellied parrots, helmeted honeyeaters, corroboree frogs and mountain pygmy-possums.

Zoos Victoria noted that the population of some of these species had increased by more than 10 per cent.

The announcement comes on National Threatened Species Day, a day which commemorates the extinction of the Tasmanian Tiger in 1936.