TRANSCRIPT
Welcome to SBS News in Easy English. I'm Greg Dyett.
More than 200 people were unable to make emergency calls during the Optus outage and the telco still doesn't know why.
Optus chief executive Kelly Bayer Rosmarin says 228 calls to triple-zero failed to go through during a 12-hour outage which affected internet and phone services to millions of customers.
Asked by committee chair Sarah Hanson-Young if Optus knew why customers were unable to make the calls, Ms Bayer Rosmarin says they had conducted some inquiries but couldn't fully investigate due to complex relationships.
Kelly Bayer Rosmarin: "I think it's too early to tell where the issue actually occurred."
Sarah Hanson-Young: "So you think it's somebody else's fault?"
Kelly Bayer Rosmarin: "No, the triple zero system is supposed to be able to pick up the traffic when we have an outage like this. So it is important. It's very important. And if someone else has an outage, we should be picking up some of the calls."
South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas has declared that flags will be flown at half mast in honour of a police officer who died after being shot during a violent confrontation.
53-year old Brevet Sergeant Jason Doig died in a shootout on a property at Senior, near Bordertown after he and two colleagues responded to reports of a disturbance.
A second police officer, Sergeant Michael Hutchinson, was also shot and is being treated in hospital for non-life threatening injuries.
Mr Malinauskas expressed his condolences.
"It has not been since 1985 that a serving police officer has lost their life at the hands of a firearm. This is a day that will dread and It is a great tragedy that a good man at the age of 53 has lost his life in service of our state in what would otherwise be a perfectly routine day on the job."
A 26-year-old male suspect was shot by police on the scene and is currently being treated in a hospital under police guard for serious life-threatening injuries.
The United Nations World Food Programme is warning of “the immediate possibility of starvation” in Gaza as the food supply has broken down under Israel's seal and too little is coming from Egypt.
With only ten percent of necessary food supplies entering Gaza since the beginning of the most recent Israel-Hamas war, food scarcity is becoming a concerning issue.
The WFP's Samer Abdeljaber says people in Gaza are forced to live on one meal per day.
“People are going hungry. In Gaza, people are surviving on just one meal a day if they are lucky."
Health Minister Mark Butler has announced the government will be making a record $166 million investment to help combat the effects of cancer on Australians.
The amount will be provided for the development of a Cancer Nursing and Navigation Program, which will help patients survive the deadly disease.
The program will also target the recruitment of 100 additional cancer nurses for the greater support of all patients across the country.
Mr Butler says Australians have some of the greatest cancer survival rates globally but the aim is to push those rates even higher.
"More than 160,000 Australians are diagnosed with cancer every single year and it's still Australia's biggest killer, in spite of the extraordinary inroads that have been made over recent decades."
I'm Greg Dyett and that's SBS News in Easy English.
