State of the Nation | Thursday, December 8, 2016

The Victorian Tertiary Admissions Centre released a statement late Wednesday nigth about the premature release of VCE results and ATARs via SMS. Read the statement and more here

►NEWCASTLE: Thousandswatched Robbie O’Davis streak to the try-line in the Newcastle Knights’ most recent TV advertising campaign. The man himself remembers watching it from a jail cell.

Now he’s hit tough times and is selling off a piece of his rugby league history.

►WAGGA: A fire that gutted a business in Pearson Street early on Wednesday morning has been labelled a “cowardly” act of vandalism.

Police are hunting for an arsonist after a suspicious blaze tore through Wagga Bricks and Roofing’s office around 2am and dealt between $300,000 and $500,000 in damages.  

►BENDIGO: The state government has pledged $50,000 to help continue the search of an Avoca mine for the remains of missing Maryborough boy Terry Floyd.

Premier Daniel Andrews personally phoned Terry’s brother Daryl this week to offer the funding, which will go a long way in the search of the disused Morning Star Mine at Bung Bong Hill, believed to be where the then 12-year-old’s body was dumped more than 40 years ago.

►DUBBO: The police have found remains they believe to be bones and bone fragments during a further search of the Butlers Falls area on Wednesday.

The two-day search for further remains of murdered woman Lateesha Nolan has ended, with the next step being to find out if the bones discovered match the femur bone found by a passer-by late last month.

►SINGLETON: Technology combined with old fashioned tracking is being used to catch and eliminate a pack of wild dogs terrorising livestock and pets in Lower Belford.

►WOLLONGONG: BlueScope’s share price has jumped 25 per cent in the last four weeks – and some pundits claim that’s because of Donald Trump.

►MUSWELLBROOK: “There is not a day goes by when I don’t think of her.”

On the 15th anniversary of Janine Vaughan’s disappearance, Muswellbrook resident Kylie Spelde has made an impassioned plea to anyone who might know the whereabouts, or what happened, to her beloved sister.

►HUGHENDEN: Flinders Shire mayor Jane McNamara has described a “dark day” in Hughenden’s history after Aurizon axed two thirds of their workforce in the town.

The job losses were among 76 roles lost in the North West with Hughenden worst affected in ratio of jobs lost to population.

►LAUNCESTON: Prominent medical scientist and Launceston arts patron, John Millwood, will serve four years’ jail for the abuse of a young boy during the 1980s.

►NATIONAL: The Salvation Army underpaid dozens of people who received financial compensation from the organisation for the alleged physical and sexual abuse they suffered in children's homes, a royal commission has heard.

The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse was told the Salvation Army's two Australian territories have underpaid abuse victims by thousands of dollars.

►MELBOURNE: The developer behind an apartment tower that would have blocked emergency helicopter flights to the Royal Melbourne Hospital has been ordered to knock three levels off its 15-level plan.

The state planning tribunal ruled on Wednesday that developer Obiter Investments, which owns a site on Flemington Road opposite the Parkville hospital, needed to change its proposal – even though two-thirds of the apartments have already been sold off the plan.

Check out what’s expected near you today.

►INDONESIA: Dozens of people have died, including three toddlers, and several more have been injured after shops and houses collapsed in the Indonesian province of Aceh after a 6.5 magnitude earthquake struck on Wednesday.

►PAKISTAN: There are unlikely to be any survivors from a Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) plane carrying more than 40 people that crashed on Wednesday in a mountainous northern region, a government official at the crash site said.

The military said 36 bodies had been recovered and rescue efforts involved about 500 soldiers, doctors and paramedics

1980: John Lennon shot

1969: Nixon declares Vietnam War is ending

1949: Chinese Nationalists move capital to Taiwan

1914: The Battle of the Falkland Islands

No one knows for sure why Margaret Illukol – left shockingly disfigured after she was attacked by a hyena in Uganda as a child – sat down at her Cooks Hill home on March 10, 2005 and changed her will by hand, and without a witness.

She crossed out a paragraph of the formal will she drew up with a solicitor in 1992, that would have seen half her $1 million estate sent to a Rotary club in the Ugandan capital of Kampala.