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In calendar news, Australia Day is officially changing date after this year and will no longer be celebrated on January 26th. With a new date of January 20th chosen instead in order to celebrate the day that Scott Morrison announced his departure from politics.

The day was reportedly chosen for the holiday as it was clearly the day that Australia has most come together to celebrate, like what Australia Day claims to be.

COVID-19 was detected in Australia four years ago today.

[Roads] are getting worse because we’re not spending enough to maintain them.

Three-quarters of our roads are managed by local councils.

Every year, those councils spend A$1 billion less on maintenance than is needed to keep those roads in their current condition – let alone improve them.

New Grattan Institute research finds the typical regional area has a funding shortfall of more 40%. In remote areas, it’s more than 75%.

One reason for this underspend is that untied federal government grants to local councils haven’t kept pace with soaring costs.

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Tight budgets make it tempting to delay maintenance.

But delaying will only end up costing more in the long run, leaving taxpayers paying more to fix more badly damaged roads.

A multi-layered strategy of vaccines, masks, safe indoor air, testing and treatment will help us navigate this COVID wave.

No one cared who I was until I put on the mask

--person trying to reduce the number of people dying

• A court has ruled a Hungry Jack's burger did not infringe on McDonald's trademark.

• McDonald's argued its rival's product could confuse consumers and eat into its profits.

• A scientist was brought in to weigh the two-patty burgers over the three-year trial.

McDonald's has lost its legal dispute with fast-food rival Hungry Jack's over its Big Mac lookalike burger the "Big Jack".

The American giant had claimed that consumers would confuse the Big Jack with the Big Mac and this would eat into McDonald's profits.

But Justice Stephen Burley ruled against the claim in the Federal Court today.

"Big Jack is not deceptively similar to Big Mac," Justice Burley said.

Australia is now into its next COVID wave. We’ve seen hints of this for a while. Case numbers and indicators of severe disease began rising in Victoria in August. But it has taken several months for a consistent pattern to emerge across Australia.

Now we see evidence of this new wave via wastewater surveillance for traces of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID. We also see rises in COVID-related hospital admissions and antiviral prescriptions. Compared to past waves, this one has built up slowly and over a longer period.

Here’s what we know about this new wave and what to expect over the coming weeks.

• Optus is investigating the cause of Wednesday's nationwide outage.

• Experts say telcos have been cost cutting, and have not properly safeguarded systems

• They say the government should legislate redundancies in major telco systems

[Industry expert Mark] Gregory said Optus and Telstra have likely concluded that building highly advanced safeguards to their infrastructure and software is too expensive and have been allowed by the government to prioritise profit over the reliability of the service.

We had the opportunity to speak to the CS2 development team at Valve to ask about the past, present, and future of one of the greatest PC games ever made..