As it happened: Man charged over death threats, antisemitic abuse sent to politicians; PM announces major funding for remote NT communities

Thanks for reading national news live. This is where we’ll end today’s coverage.

Here’s a look back at today’s biggest stories:

• Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was in Alice Springs this morning, and announced $840 million in funding to support remote Indigenous communities in reaching closing the gap targets. It’s largely a continuation of funding of essential services, with some money going towards “mediation and peacekeeping activities” aimed at addressing the youth crime issue in Alice Springs and has been widely welcomed by Indigenous groups.
• Retiring Nationals MP and former cabinet minister Keith Pitt is expected to be appointed as Australia’s next ambassador to the Holy See. Pitt, a fierce enemy of Nationals leader David Littleproud, had considered challenging for the party leadership this term but announced his resignation late last year. His appointment to the Vatican has been in the works for months.
• The daughter of 95-year-old Clare Nowland, who died after she was Tasered by a police officer in her NSW nursing home, has told a court she is forever haunted by the “utter disregard” of the killer’s words. Former senior constable Kristian James Samuel White was found guilty in November of the manslaughter of Nowland after discharging his Taser as she held a knife in Cooma’s Yallambee Lodge nursing home on May 17, 2023.
• The ABC executive who removed journalist Antoinette Lattouf over a post accusing Israel of using starvation tactics did not know her exact views on the Gaza war before she was dismissed, a court has heard. Giving evidence on Friday, the ABC’s outgoing content chief, Chris Oliver-Taylor, told the court he did not know exactly what Lattouf’s views on the war were when he made the decision not to put her back on air.
• A Victorian man has been charged with making death threats towards federal and state parliamentarians. The 33-year-old was charged yesterday with four counts of using a carriage service to menace, harass or cause offence and one count of using a carriage service to threaten to kill. Both charges carry a maximum penalty of five years.

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Coalition Indigenous affairs spokeswoman Jacinta Nampijinpa Price has revealed she battled drug and alcohol abuse in her 20s, just a day after Opposition Leader Peter Dutton made his own major personal disclosure.

Price recounted surviving domestic violence from a man she dated between her first and second husbands, which led her to abuse drugs and alcohol in the aftermath.

Coalition Indigenous affairs spokeswoman Jacinta Nampijinpa PriceCredit: James Brickwood

“It would be easy for me to gloss over this period, perhaps to briefly touch on it and move on, but there is no point in me telling my story if I’m not completely honest,” Price said in an interview with the Weekend Australian Magazine. “And that means sharing the darkest period of my life. It’s a time I’m not proud of, but one that very much shaped who I am today.”

Price’s disclosure follows Dutton’s decision on Thursday night to tell Sky how his engagement to the mother of his first child broke down while she was pregnant, giving voters a clearer look at the personal lives of the Coalition figures before the election due by May.

Dutton, who typically gives little away about his personal life, also said on Thursday he was briefly married in his early 20s.

Read the full story here.

Energy stocks dragged the Australian sharemarket into the red on Friday, capping off a week of worldwide turbulence caused by fears of a global trade war as US President Donald Trump’s strategy on tariffs came into play.

The Australian sharemarket opened lower on Friday before being lifted into the green by communication, IT and consumer stocks at lunchtime, however the benchmark index ultimately closed 9.3 points lower, or 0.1 per cent, to 8,511.4 points.

Domino’s investors celebrated the pizza chain’s announcement of 205 store closures, most of which are in Japan. It is the first major move by newly installed chief executive Mark van Dyck, who has declared a focus on disciplined growth and “decisive action”. The pizza business held its place at the top of the bourse all day with gains of 21.3 per cent.

KFC and Taco Bell operator Collins Foods also closed 12.7 per cent higher after US multinational brand owner Yum! Brands released fourth quarter figures showing solid sales growth for KFC. Lynas Rare Earths jumped 6.1 per cent, while digital property portal REA Group finished 2.8 per cent higher after reporting a 26 per cent rise in half-year profit

Catch up on our full recap of the trading day here.

Retiring Nationals MP and former cabinet minister Keith Pitt is expected to be appointed as Australia’s next ambassador to the Holy See.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is expected to make the announcement as soon as today. Pitt has been contacted for comment.

Keith Pitt will become Australia’s next ambassador to the Vatican. Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Senior National Party sources believe Pitt’s Queensland seat of Hinkler, which he held on a 10 per margin at the 2022 election, may be vulnerable. Pitt will no longer be able to campaign in Hinkler alongside the party’s new candidate when he takes up his Vatican post.

Pitt, a fierce enemy of Nationals leader David Littleproud, had considered challenging for the party leadership this term but announced his resignation late last year. His appointment to the Holy See has been in the works for months.

Read our coverage of the breaking news here.

Protesters will take to the streets this weekend to campaign against harmful uses of AI and urge the Australian government to help freeze advancements in what is being described as potentially “the most dangerous technology ever created”.

A global protest movement dubbed PauseAI is descending on cities including Melbourne ahead of next week’s Artificial Intelligence Action Summit, to be held in Paris. The protesters say the summit lacks any focus on AI safety.

Protesters will urge the government to freeze advancements in AI this weekend. Credit: Bloomberg

China and the US are each racing ahead with AI development. Millions of Australians are using Chinese AI app DeepSeek and the US is spending $US500 billion to accelerate its own AI efforts, in a joint venture dubbed Stargate.

Protesters will take to the streets this weekend to campaign against harmful uses of AI and urge the Australian government to help freeze advancements in what is being described as potentially “the most dangerous technology ever created”.

A global protest movement dubbed PauseAI is descending on cities including Melbourne ahead of next week’s Artificial Intelligence Action Summit, to be held in Paris. The protesters say the summit lacks any focus on AI safety.

China and the US are each racing ahead with AI development. Millions of Australians are using Chinese AI app DeepSeek and the US is spending $US500 billion to accelerate its own AI efforts, in a joint venture dubbed Stargate.

Read the full story here.

The Federal Court has demolished the Australian Federal Police’s attempts to keep secret the details of an anti-corruption investigation that reached the top levels of the peak policing body, having rejected arguments that releasing the information would be against the public interest.

Police had refused, under freedom of information legislation, to release any details of a corruption probe into the 2018 leak that compromised one of the most controversial cases in the agency’s history – one looking into the actions of war criminal Ben Roberts-Smith.

After a four-year legal battle by this masthead, the court on Monday ruled that many of the grounds police had used to refuse the information’s release were spurious, or wrong in law.

The court’s decision comes as this masthead can reveal new details about the corruption probe into how Roberts-Smith was tipped off that he was the subject of secret federal police war crimes inquiries.

Since 2021, the AFP has spent hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars on the legal fight to keep from the public the details of how it internally handled the leaks to Roberts-Smith.

Read the full story here.

Denise Bowden, chief executive of the Yothu Yindi Foundation, said $840 million in federal funding pledged today should have a measurable impact on regional and remote Indigenous communities, and that decisions around its use should be done by Aboriginal communities.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was in Alice Springs this morning and announced $840 million in funding to support remote Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory in reaching closing the gap targets.

It’s largely a continuation of funding of essential service, with some money going towards “mediation and peacekeeping activities” aimed at addressing the youth crime issue in Alice Springs.

Yothu Yindi Foundation chief executive Denise Bowden.Credit: Melanie Faith Dove

“We see this as an important step forward and will support both infrastructure and service delivery,” Bowden told the ABC.

She also stressed that Indigenous communities needed to be empowered to use the funding appropriately to close the gap.

“I worry that the political footballing continues to date. I think we’ve got to rise above that … we’ve all got a responsibility to ensure we’re not having this conversation [about Indigenous disadvantage] again after $840 million has been invested in the territory.”

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has again stated he won’t provide “an ongoing commentary on comments made by the president of the United States”.

Speaking to the media in Lennox Head, NSW, Albanese was asked by a reporter if he had a view on Opposition Leader Peter Dutton indicating he might support Donald Trump’s ban on transgender women competing in women’s sport.

“Peter Dutton can speak for Peter Dutton and other leaders can speak for themselves as well, around the world,” Albanese said.

“My responsibility is to look after Australia. That’s my priority and I do that diligently.”

It follows comments the prime minister made on Thursday, that he wouldn’t regularly answer questions about the US president’s actions and statements.

Some of Australia’s biggest companies including Australia Post, Canva, Telstra and PwC have quit the federal scheme that allows them to claim net-zero carbon emissions amid mounting integrity concerns.

Australian corporations have spent hundreds of millions of dollars in the past decade buying offsets in the voluntary market to reduce their climate footprint, but there are rising doubts about whether the projects generating those offsets reduce greenhouse gases.

More than 100 companies have left the Climate Active scheme in the past two years, with the damaging corporate departures prompting the federal government to consider radically reshaping or shutting down the so-called “voluntary market” in carbon credits.

Some departing companies cite growing global scepticism over the quality of Australian and international carbon abatement certificates.Credit: Jessica Shapiro

Climate Active is a federal government-run voluntary register that companies join to report their carbon emissions and the offsets they are buying so they can then claim to their customers they are carbon-neutral.

Companies to have walked away include Australia Post, the Cbus superannuation fund, Telstra, NRMA, Canva and PwC. Even the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, the federal government’s $30 billion “green bank”, pulled out of Climate Active last October.

Some departing companies cite growing global scepticism over the quality of Australian and international carbon abatement certificates. Others say they now prefer to focus on directly reducing their own emissions directly rather than buying offsets.

A spokesperson for the Clean Energy Regulator, the government body that administers the Australian carbon market, said it was “highly regarded globally, compared to other carbon markets including those in Europe and the United States”.

Read the full exclusive here.

The daughter of 95-year-old Clare Nowland, who died after she was Tasered by a police officer in her NSW nursing home, has told a court she is forever haunted by the “utter disregard” of the killer’s words.

Former senior constable Kristian James Samuel White was found guilty in November of the manslaughter of Nowland after discharging his Taser as she held a knife in Cooma’s Yallambee Lodge nursing home on May 17, 2023.

Kristian White arrives at the NSW Supreme Court for his sentence hearing over Clare Nowland’s manslaughter.Credit: Nikki Short

CCTV and body-worn cameras captured the encounter, which lasted two to three minutes and ended with White saying “Stop, just, nah, bugger it”. Nowland, a great-grandmother who had dementia, fell backwards and hit her head. She died in hospital seven days later.

Nowland’s children and grandchildren shared their grief in victim impact statements at White’s sentence hearing in the NSW Supreme Court on Friday, describing her death as brutal, barbaric, inhumane and incomprehensible.

Her daughter Gemma Murphy said the footage of the incident had left a “grotesque image” that she cannot erase.

“The echoes of Kristian White’s words, ‘nah, bugger it’ and ‘got her’ will forever haunt me,” she said.

Read our full reporting here.