RUSH HOUR: The stories you need to know today
TYRA Banks has unleashed her terrifying vision of the future. She has lots of ideas, but it all starts with plastic surgery via drinking water.
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TODAY
● The Gold Coast’s beached whale has been freed
● Major airlines and supermarkets are refusing to reduce their prices once the carbon tax is scrapped
LIVE UPDATES
10am
That’s it for our RUSH HOUR live news blog for this morning. You can get across the stories you need to know today below.
9.55am
Jurors are likely to retire today to consider their verdict in the Baden-Clay trial.
The long-running trial enters its final hours this morning, after the defence and prosecutions finished their summaries earlier this week.
Gerard Baden-Clay is accused of killing his wife Allison in 2012, but the judge yesterday told the jury it could consider a lesser charge of manslaughter should they find him not guilty of murder.
Keep up to date with the case with The Courier-Mail.
9.45am
It feels like we’ve been waiting for it to be killed off for months, but the government says the carbon tax will be repealed today.
Finance Minister Mathias Cormann has told ABC radio that he expects the Senate to scrap the tax today.
“It looks like the carbon tax will be history very soon,” he said.
The passage of the repeal legislation hit a snag yesterday when Australian Motoring Enthusiast Party Senator Ricky Muir split from his Palmer United Party allies to unexpectedly side with Labor and the Greens. But he later patched up his differences with the PUP and agreed to vote to bring down the carbon pricing scheme today.
9.30am
Argentina will face Germany in the World Cup final on Monday morning (Australia time) after beating Netherlands in a dramatic penalty shootout.
Argentinian goalkeeper Sergio Romero pulled off two magnificent saves to help claim the shootout 4-2.
The nailbiting ending followed 120 minutes of scoreless play. Read up on all of the latest in our World Cup live blog.
9.15am
Indonesia will have to wait weeks to find out the official winner of its presidential race, after both sides declared victory.
Almost 190 million Indonesians voted in the world’s third-biggest democracy yesterday, AAP reports.
In indicative quick-count results showed Joko Widodo had 53 per cent of the vote versus the Prabowo Subianto’s 47 per cent.
8.45am
Design-your-own babies, robot butlers and plastic surgery via drinking water. This is model Tyra Banks’ disturbing vision of the future.
After commissioning country-pop darling Taylor Swift to write about her vision of the future of the music industry earlier this week, The Wall Street Journal has now published model Tyra Banks’ thoughts on what the future of beauty will be like. And her vision is terrifying.
She has written her top 10 predictions for how beauty will attained and judged in the future and highlights include:
● Design-your-own babies: “The features of one’s baby will be as selectable as menu items at a fast-food drive-through window.”
● Robot butlers: “Everyone will have at least one personal robot/assistant/companion. The robot will have super artificial intelligence and will be able to sense if its owner is having a low-self-esteem day and will then strategically give boosts of confidence to its owner. ‘Wow, Eloisa! Your eyes look especially lovely today.’”
● Plastic surgery via drinking water: “For those who choose not to go for plastic surgery, beauty ingestibles (active waters, etc.) will give instant, yet temporary results: contoured cheekbones, rosy cheeks, arched eyebrows.”
Read all of her disturbing predictions in The Wall Street Journal.
8.20am
He's free! They've done it. #Whale #humpback @tennewsqld pic.twitter.com/qXE3wCuy1J
— Matthew Howard (@MatthewamHoward) July 9, 2014Free Willy!
The juvenile humpback whale that has been stranded on Gold Coast beach since Tuesday afternoon has just been freed.
GO WHALE GO!! @7NewsBrisbane pic.twitter.com/OkLr4al5Dj
— Julie Korner (@JulieKorner) July 9, 20148.05am
Best. Pilot. Ever.
A US pilot has ordered pizzas for his passengers when their plane was stuck on a tarmac for two hours, the BBC reports.
Gerhard Bradner ordered 50 pizzas for his 160 passengers after the plane was diverted to Wyoming due to stormy weather in Denver.
The entire cabin burst into applause at the sight of the surprise meal.
7.50am
Scrapping the carbon tax was meant to save us money, right? Well, not if some of Australia’s biggest airlines and supermarkets have anything to do with it.
Qantas, Virgin Australia and Woolworths are all refusing to reduce their prices once the carbon tax is scrapped, The Daily Telegraph reports.
Qantas has ditched its carbon tax surcharge, but said ticket prices would not fall as a result. Virgin has also confirmed that it will not reduce its prices.
Woolworths claims that its prices did not increase with the tax, so it doesn’t expect any significant price changes once it’s repealed.
Read more here.
7.20am
A three-year-old boy savagely stabbed to death has been remembered as a “lovely little boy”, as his father faces court over his murder.
Luca Janzow died in Adelaide’s Women’s and Children’s Hospital on Tuesday after his father, David Janzow, flagged down police saying his son had been hurt, The Advertiser reports.
Mr Janzow, 36, who has been charged with his son’s murder, will undergo psychiatric assessment, Adelaide Magistrates Court heard yesterday as he appeared in a court via phone-link.
The acting headmaster at Luca’s childcare, Neil Andary, said he was “a lovely little kid who engaged well with others”.
Read more in The Advertiser.
7am
A Sydney judge has shocked child abuse survivors with comments that equated incest and pedophilia with homosexuality.
Presiding over a case of a man accused of repeatedly raping his sister in the 1980s, District Court judge Garry Neilson compared the alleged incest with gay sex which, he said, was socially unacceptable and criminal until the 1970s, but was now widely accepted, Fairfax reports.
“A jury might find nothing untoward in the advance of a brother towards his sister once she had sexually matured, had sexual relationships with other men and was now ‘available’, not having (a) sexual partner,” Judge Neilson said.
He said the “only reason” incest was still a crime because any resultant children had a high risk of being born with genetic abnormalities.
“But even that falls away to an extent (because) there is such ease of contraception and ready access to abortion,” he said.
Adults Surviving Child Abuse president Carol Kezelman told Fairfax that the comments were “ill-informed” and “outrageous”.
6.30am
NSW lost the battle but won the war last night when Queensland clawed back to win game three of the State of Origin last night at Suncorp Stadium.
The Maroons managed to save face, dominating the rugby league match 32-8, but it barely mattered because NSW had already won the first two games in the series and could lay claim to the shield, breaking Queensland’s eight-year winning streak.
“For the five million people back in NSW, I hope you’re going to enjoy this as much as we will,” NSW captain Paul Gallen said.
Read a full wrap-up of the game here.
6.15am
A 30-year-old woman has died after she became trapped under a flipped truck yesterday afternoon on Sydney’s north shore.
The woman was carrying her four-year-old son about 5pm when the tipper truck carrying soil and rocks rolled backwards down a driveway in Wahroonga.
The truck tipped over, trapping the woman underneath. She died at the scene.
The son was treated for facial injuries in hospital.
The 67-year-old male truck driver was not in the vehicle at the time of the incident.
Read more in The Daily Telegraph.
6.01am
Efforts to save a beached whale on the Gold Coast will resume at first light this morning.
Rescuers from SeaWorld tried yesterday afternoon to free the juvenile humpback, which has been stranded on Palm Beach since Tuesday night, but their efforts failed when ropes used to harness the mammal snapped three times.
There was some hope when the waves flipped the whale during high tide, but it wasn’t enough to allow the whale to manage its way back into deeper waters.
6am
Good morning and welcome to our headlines-in-a-hurry news coverage. We’ll be bringing you the morning’s biggest stories so you can get across the news quickly.
Originally published as RUSH HOUR: The stories you need to know today
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