Wendy Wales and Tony Lonergan’s four-year fight over MACH Energy’s Mount Pleasant coalmine went all the way to the high court

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When Wendy Wales and Tony Lonergan and a few of their neighbours in the New South Wales Hunter region decided to take on the expansion of a local coalmine, people thought they were “crazy” to engage in the David and Goliath battle.

“When we started this, people thought we were crazy – a little community group taking on a billion-dollar coal company, arguing that the climate harm from burning this coal is our problem too,” Wales says.

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Councillors are pushing for a ban on short-term rentals, particularly in inner-city suburbs – where vacancy rates can be as low as 1%

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At 10am on High Street in Millers Point, it’s checkout time. Departing guests have left laundry bags on their verandas for cleaners, who have laid out fresh towels on beds in neighbouring rooms. Other guests are heading out sightseeing in “I love Sydney” T-shirts.

Although it boasts enviable harbour views, this is not a tourist resort. It’s a street of Federation-era houses – formerly some of the oldest public housing in Australia – overtaken by short-term rentals, many of them managed through Airbnb.

Guardian Australia tours problematic Malabar wastewater plant where some accumulated fats, oils and grease can’t be accessed – let alone cleared

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“This,” says Fiona Copeman, the hub manager of the Malabar wastewater treatment plant, “is what you would call our four-bus area.”

Copeman is gesturing to a model of the plant on a table inside the facility itself. She’s referring to a 300 cubic metre underground chamber that houses, as Guardian Australia revealed in January, a “fatberg the size of four buses that likely birthed poo balls that closed Sydney beaches”.

Israeli president will meet prime minister Anthony Albanese and travel to Canberra and Melbourne as pro-Palestine supporters stage protests

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Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, has told members of the Jewish community “when one Jew is hurt, all Jews feel their pain” as he begins a four-day visit to Australia to speak with survivors of the Bondi terror attack and the victims’ families.

Herzog, who arrived in Sydney on Monday morning, laid a wreath at the site of the antisemitic attack alongside the NSW premier, Chris Minns.

Experts say Sydney Water should better treat wastewater before sending it offshore at Malabar, Bondi and North Head. The corporation disagrees

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In the first half of the 1900s, the mantra “the solution to pollution is dilution” ruled. The idea was that harmful chemicals and pollutants could be dealt with by spreading them out in the environment.

Now, that approach is derided as outdated and, often, dangerous.

Exclusive: Secret report suggests fats, oils and grease accumulate in ‘inaccessible dead zone’ at Malabar plant, then dislodge when pumping pressure ‘rapidly increases’

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A giant fatberg, potentially the size of four Sydney buses, within Sydney Water’s Malabar deepwater ocean sewer has been identified as the likely source of the debris balls that washed up on Sydney beaches a year ago.

Sydney Water isn’t sure exactly how big the fatberg is because it can’t easily access where it has accumulated.

Australians of any faith or background urged to do a good deed ‘in memory and honour of those who no longer can’

When the New South Wales government asked Jewish faith leaders what they wanted after the explosion of hate that targeted their community and claimed 15 lives at Bondi beach, they requested positive action.

The idea Rabbi Nochum Schapiro presented to the emergency meeting of the NSW Faith Affairs Council convened by the minister for multiculturalism, Steve Kamper, was simple. It was for everyone to perform one mitzvah – an act of kindness.