Snow falls overnight near Eukey in the Queensland Southern Downs region.

A Japanese multinational agreed to pay its workers a 2 per cent annual bonus. It ended up in court blaming an errant keystroke after filing paperwork agreeing to pay a 10 per cent bonus.

Mr de Man has encouraged the community to thank their police officers for the work they do.

The warm weather is about to end in Victoria, with the state set to be hit by a deluge of rain, hail and snow from today and temperatures set to hang around the low teens all weekend.

A north-east Victorian alpine village says it will welcome visitors when restrictions allow despite uncertainty whether the ski season will go ahead at all.

It's been revealed a third of reported cane toads in NSW are misidentified and are in fact native — and even endangered — frogs.

A flight school is forced to improve its safety regime after a student pilot who was sleep deprived and sick flew into Adelaide's controlled airspace after falling unconscious at the controls.

Police are preparing an operation to recover the bodies of two men who are believed to have fallen while rock climbing in a remote part of South Australia's Flinders Ranges.

A South Australian man killed his close friend when he landed on top of him during a drunken fight, causing an internal cyst to fatally rupture, a court hears.

An 80-year-old woman dies in hospital after succumbing to injuries she suffered when falling out of her vehicle in the car park of a hotel on Thursday morning.

While the world has lost artworks by Rembrandt, da Vinci, and Van Gogh in just a few hundred years, some Indigenous art has lasted more than 30,000 years. So what is the secret?

Catching a glimpse of snow at the top of Bluff Knoll is a highly sought after WA bucket-list item, but this history of snowfall in WA spans Geraldton to Southern Cross.

A severe weather warning for Tasmania's east coast is cancelled but heavy rain continues to fall in the region, with snow in the highlands.

Tracey hoped putting her mother in an aged care home would give her a sense of security, but she ended up severely injuring herself in a fall. Warning: contains graphic images.

Almost half a century on, John is setting out to write a memoir about the incident and the events that followed. The process meant revisiting the event and the questions that have been left unanswered.

In the past two years Kylie Jones has undergone eight surgeries to treat her endometriosis, including having her fallopian tubes and an ovary removed.

Jorgen Jorgenson visited Van Diemen's Land when it was first settled 20 years later he would return as a convict and former self-proclaimed king of Iceland.

A late spring blast of icy air from Antarctica has deposited up to 10 centimetres of snow on parts of Tasmania, but people are being urged to "get their skis on" quickly if they want to play in it.

A 77-year-old man dies on a rural property on the west coast of South Australia after falling into a grain bin. SafeWork SA will investigate.

Snowboarder Matt Golding was swept down 'Mary's Slide' after triggering an avalanche.

As tourists flock to Uluru ahead of the October 26 climb closure, a young South Australian girl has fallen at least 20 metres while descending from the summit.

The leading car at the World Solar Challenge bursts into flames and is forced out of the race just south of Port Augusta. It follows three cars being blown off the road yesterday in strong winds.

The 66-year-old man is the latest person to die at a worksite in the Northern Territory, which has the highest rates of workplace deaths per capita.

Australian National University students slam staff over on-campus accommodation support, which they say is structured in a way that the first port of call for a student to report sexual violence is to talk to another student.

A man has been taken to hospital in a critical condition after falling from a height of several metres at a Canberra worksite, and landing on materials that may have "exacerbated" his injuries.

Forty years after the Vietnam War, two Canberra veterans have developed digital maps to help locate some 300,000 Vietnamese war dead still missing in action.

A significant drop in temperature and drenching of rain overnight saw Canberrans wake up to snow this morning, blanketing the region and delaying highway traffic.

A Cape York mayor says a perpetual cycle of death is ripping his community apart and more can be done to detect chronic diseases earlier.

A man is dead and a woman seriously injured after falling more than 10 metres from a zipline in the Daintree rainforest in Far North Queensland, police say.

The woman, 32, and man, 24, were reported missing in the Cairns area yesterday after they both failed to show up for work.

An endangered marsupial known for mating itself to death disappears from one of its most prominent Queensland habitats.

Food and drink businesses defied an overall drop in UK exports during the first quarter of 2020 as supply chain disruption and international efforts to combat coronavirus hit overseas sales of goods and services, according to the Lloyds Bank International Trade Index.

Lambs have died of hypothermia and orchards are ready for a fruitful spring following a snow event in regional New South Wales.

With the coronavirus pandemic putting an unprecedented strain on Portland’s finances, Mayor Ted Wheeler proposed a budget Thursday that he pledged would be able to withstand the economic blow.

NICK Bertus and Will ­Affleck fell just three runs short of a century-old record to lead Parramatta to a two-day win over Western Suburbs.

NJ Rock Band Harvest Falls Debuts Video, Single, Charity Drive For New Song "MOMENT OF CONSEQUENCE"

By Rob Stein, Carmel Wroth, Alyson Hurt

To safely phase out social distancing measures, the U.S. needs more diagnostic testing for the coronavirus, experts say. But how much more?

The Trump administration said on April 27 that the U.S. will soon have enough capacity to conduct double the current amount of testing for active infections. The country has done nearly 248,000 tests daily on average in the past seven days, according to the nonprofit COVID Tracking Project. Doubling that would mean doing about 496,000 a day.

Will that be enough? What benchmark should states try to hit?

One prominent research group, Harvard's Global Health Institute, proposes that the U.S. should be doing more than 900,000 tests per day as a country. This projection, released Thursday, is a big jump from its earlier projection of testing need, which had been between 500,000 and 600,000 daily.

Harvard's testing estimate increased, says Ashish Jha, director of the Global Health Institute, because the latest modeling shows that the outbreak in the United States is worse than projected earlier.

"Just in the last few weeks, all of the models have converged on many more people getting infected and many more people [dying]," he says.

But each state's specific need for testing varies depending on the size of its outbreak, explains Jha. The bigger the outbreak, the more testing is needed.

On Thursday, Jha's group at Harvard published a simulation that estimates the amount of testing needed in each state by May 15. In the graphic below, we compare these estimates with the average numbers of daily tests states are currently doing.

Two ways to assess whether testing is adequate

To make their state-by-state estimates, the Harvard Global Health Institute group started from a model of future case counts. It calculated how much testing would be needed for a state to test all infected people and any close contacts they may have exposed to the virus. (The simulation estimates testing 10 contacts on average.)

"Testing is outbreak control 101, because what testing lets you do is figure out who's infected and who's not," Jha says. "And that lets you separate out the infected people from the noninfected people and bring the disease under control."

This approach is how communities can prevent outbreaks from flaring up. First, test all symptomatic people, then reach out to their close contacts and test them, and finally ask those who are infected or exposed to isolate themselves.

Our chart also shows another testing benchmark for each state: the ratio of tests conducted that come back positive. Communities that see about 10% or fewer positives among their test results are probably testing enough, the World Health Organization advises. If the rate is higher, they're likely missing a lot of active infections.

What is apparent from the data we present below is that many states are far from both the Harvard estimates and the 10% positive benchmark.

Just nine states are near or have exceeded the testing minimums estimated by Harvard; they are mostly larger, less populous states: Alaska, Hawaii, Montana, North Dakota, Oregon, Tennessee, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming.

Several states with large outbreaks — New York, Massachusetts and Connecticut, among others — are very far from the minimum testing target. Some states that are already relaxing their social distancing restrictions, such as Georgia, Texas and Colorado, are far from the target too.

Jha offers several caveats about his group's estimates.

Estimates are directional, not literal

Researchers at the Global Health Initiative at Harvard considered three different models of the U.S. coronavirus outbreak as a starting point for their testing estimates. They found that while there was significant variation in the projections of outbreak sizes, all of the models tend to point in the same direction, i.e., if one model showed that a state needed significantly more testing, the others generally did too.

The model they used to create these estimates is the Youyang Gu COVID-19 Forecasts, which they say has tracked closely with what's actually happened on the ground. Still, the researchers caution, these numbers are not meant to be taken literally but as a guide.

Can't see this visual? Click here.

If social distancing is relaxed, testing needs may grow

The Harvard testing estimates are built on a model that assumes that states continue social distancing through May 15. And about half of states have already started lifting some of those.

Jha says that without the right measures in place to contain spread, easing up could quickly lead to new cases.

"The moment you relax, the number of cases will start climbing. And therefore, the number of tests you need to keep your society, your state from having large outbreaks will also start climbing," warns Jha.

Testing alone is not enough

A community can't base the decision that it's safe to open up on testing data alone. States should also see a consistent decline in the number of cases, of two weeks at least, according to White House guidance. If their cases are instead increasing, they should assume the number of tests they need will increase too.

And, Jha warns, testing is step one, but it won't contain an outbreak by itself. It needs to be part of "a much broader set of strategies and plans the states need to have in place" when they begin to reopen.

In fact, his group's model is built on the assumption that states are doing contact tracing and have plans to support isolation for infected or exposed people.

"I don't want anybody to just look at the number and say, we meet it and we're good to go," he says. "What this really is, is testing capacity in the context of having a really effective workforce of contact tracers."

The targets are floors, not goals

States that have reached the estimated target should think of that as a starting point.

"We've always built these as the floor, the bare minimum," Jha says. More testing would be even better, allowing states to more rapidly tamp down case surges.

In fact, other experts have proposed that the U.S. do even more testing. Paul Romer, a professor of economics at New York University, proposed in a recent white paper that if the U.S. tested every resident, every two weeks, isolating those who test positive, it could stop the pandemic in its tracks.

Jha warns that without sufficient testing, and the infrastructure in place to trace and isolate contacts, there's a real risk that states — even those with few cases now — will see new large outbreaks. "I think what people have to remember is that the virus isn't gone. The disease isn't gone. And it's going to be with us for a while," he says.

Can't see this visual? Click here.

Daniel Wood contributed to this report.

This Is The Second Installment Of HBC Fest In The 12th Year Of The Hae Bang Chon Music Festival With A Great Lineup Taking Us Into A New Decade For Independent Music

Don't take it to the bank, but it is starting to look like the last flakes have flown across much of Colorado for the winter.

Facets Of Folk Hit #1 On The Folk Alliance International Folk DJ Charts And Is Now On The List For Consideration For The Grammy® For Best Folk Album

Facets Of Folk Hit #1 On The Folk Alliance International Folk DJ Charts And Is Now On The List For Consideration For The Grammy® For Best Folk Album

It's going to be a little bit until the big shows.

The post Live Nation CEO Outlines Reopening Strategy: Experimenting with Shows In The Fall, Be On Sale in Q3/Q4, Full Scale By 2021 appeared first on Metal Injection.

Weather forecasters issued a winter weather travel alert and have urged people to only venture out into snowy, slushy roads if it is essential.

Weather forecasters issued a winter weather travel alert and have urged people to only venture out into snowy, slushy roads if it is essential.

First, the coronavirus pandemic claimed the state basketball championships. Then, it forced CHSAA to cancel the spring season altogether on April 21.

Don't take it to the bank, but it is starting to look like the last flakes have flown across much of Colorado for the winter.

Keke turns Kevin into a scream queen!