Lime Scooter Prices Rise as Competitors Roll In

Lime has raised the hire cost of its city scooters despite a new scooter competitor set to arrive on Brisbane streets next month.

Lime public affairs manager Nelson Savanh said prices were raised by eight cents per minute to ensure a safe premium service.

Competitors Neuron Mobility will be operating 600 orange scooters on Brisbane streets by August following Brisbane City Council approval last month.

MyGov Outage Disrupts Tax Returns and Centrelink

The main online portal for government services MyGov was offline for four hours last Friday disrupting tax returns and Centrelink users.

Affected Australians took to social media to raise their anger regarding the outage, which meant Australians couldn’t report their income to Centrelink.  

General Manager Hank Jongen said investigations are underway to determine the cause of the outage.

Telstra Outage Blamed on Unusual Customer Traffic

A Telstra outage which caused issues for shoppers and bank customers around the country is been blamed on an "unusually large volume of traffic" in NSW.

The nation’s four big banks and major supermarkets were affected by the outage, which inhibited some EFTPOS terminals and access to ATMs on Thursday. 

Telstra apologised for the outage and says it worked as quickly as possible to restore the disruption to its data services.

Power Blackout Causes Chaos in New York City

A New York City power outage plunged Times Square into darkness on Saturday after a blackout knocked out power to more than 7,300 homes and businesses.

People caught in the outage were stuck in elevators and subways, while Broadway theatre performances were cancelled. 

John Mcavoy, executive chief of energy firm Con Edison, said the cause of the outage is unclear and does not appear related to excessive load.

Magnitude-6.6 Quake Strikes Western Australia

A magnitude-6.6 earthquake in the Indian Ocean has been felt across large parts of Western Australia.

The quake struck about 200 kilometres off the coast, between Broome and Port Hedland at 1:39pm on Sunday. 

Geoscience Australia seismologist Phil Cummins said this event may happen every 20 years and people should be aware aftershock earthquakes may be triggered.

Brisbane Koala Injuries Rising

Nearly 100 koalas hit by cars or attacked by animals were hospitalised at the RSPCA’s Brisbane headquarters in the last year, doubling previous numbers. 

RSPCA executive manager Sheila Collecott says the same koalas are repeatedly injured since rehabilitated koalas are legally required to be sent back to the same danger zone.

RSPCA experts are expecting new laws permitting wildlife groups to relocate koalas to safer areas will be introduced in the coming months.

Thelma Plum - 'Better in Blak'

Thelma Plum is a 24-year-old Gamilaraay woman, musician and creator. She grew up in Brisbane and spent many of her childhood years on her Grandparents’ farm in Delungra, a small country town in rural New South Wales. She has been making music for her whole life, but hasn’t always been ready to share her story, until now. Thelma Plum’s debut album Better In Blak is a story about culture, heritage, love, and pain. With incredible strength, courage and heartbreaking tenderness, her debut album captures so deftly what it’s like to be a young Aboriginal woman in Australia. Since releasing her 2014 EP Monsters, Thelma has been through a lot. “On this album I speak about how it feels being an Aboriginal woman in this country. When I was younger I wasn’t ready to share this side of me, but I’ve grown a lot in the past few years and that’s changed,” says Thelma. Thelma started working on her debut album four years ago. In fact, she had an album of songs ready to go, but she scrapped it entirely and decided to start again. “I’d written all these songs, but they didn’t represent what I’d been through. So, I rewrote the whole thing,” explains Thelma. “The new songs just came to me, because I’d reached a point in my life where I was very ready to write them”. Listening to Better In Blak, you can tell that this is true. Written and recorded across New York, London and Sydney with her frequent collaborator, producer Alex Burnett (Antony & Cleopatra, Sparkadia), the album is 12 tracks of Thelma at her best; brutally honest, insightful, incisive and with her heart on her sleeve. You can hear it on the album’s title track – a tribute to family and people of colour – or on the album’s anthemic second song ‘Don’t Let A Good Girl Down’, where she spins her experiences of hate and bigotry into a hard-hitting pop song. On synth-laden track ‘Woke Blokes’, Thelma sings about fake allies who feign political correctness, only when it suits them. Later, she discusses representation and learning to love herself on ‘Homecoming Queen’: “I never saw Aboriginal women on television or in magazines while I was growing up. When you don’t see people who look like you in the media, it really skews your perception of yourself”, says Thelma. And amongst all of that, she manages to find time to make you want to dance, laugh and cry. Singles like ‘Not Angry Anymore’ and the album’s opener ‘Clumsy Love’ (#79 in triple j’s Hottest 100) are certified pop hits, while ‘Love and War’ (featuring Gang of Youths’ Dave Le’Aupepe) was written the about the events at the Don Dale Youth Detention Centre. There are intimate moments, ferociously honest break up songs, and the album’s wonderous closer ‘Made For You’ – a love song she wrote with Paul Kelly – that impressed Paul McCartney so much that he offered to write guitar parts for it. Whilst recording ‘Made For You’ in New York with producer David Kahne (The Strokes, Stevie Nicks, Lana Del Rey), musical icon Paul McCartney dropped by the studio and asked him he was working on. After days of having Thelma’s song stuck in his head, McCartney wrote additional guitar parts for the song which, of course, made it on to the album. Thelma had a chance to thank Paul in person at his sold-out arena tour of Australia last year. For Thelma, one of the most vulnerable moments on the record arrives in the form of ‘Thulumaay Gii’, a song about healing. “I wrote this song for my mum who raised me as a single mother,” says Thelma. “We were very poor and it was hard for her, but she gave me such a wonderful life”. ‘Thulumaay Gii’ is Thelma’s middle name and translates to ‘Thunder and Heart’ in Kamilaroi, the language of her Gamilaraay people. It feels fitting for one of the country’s brightest songwriters, whose essence is indeed, thunder and heart.

Thelma Plum: Better In Blak

- Brissy girl and Gamilaraay woman Thelma Plum found herself in the spotlight last year after making a Facebook post detailing an altercation she’d had with Sticky FingersDylan Frost outside an inner-west Sydney pub. Online threats and abuse poured in when the post’s audience grew, and when Frost’s badly-executed apology drew further attention. 

Bleached: Don't You Think You've Had Enough?

- Championing sun-drenched power pop with enough grit to appease punks, Bleached rep their LA locality with pride, endlessly weaving into their lyrics. The spirit is just inseparable from the music. Typically it's been impossible to hear the group without imagining sipping suds with your crew, lazing out on a sandy expanse, drinking in the sunshine or cruising along to a back-alley gig. However the place of sobriety this record is written from is a contradiction to the downing-drinks sentiment that listeners have become accustomed to.