Australians are being warned to take care when visiting their mums on Mother's Day, particularly if they are elderly.

Vice President Mike Pence's press secretary has the coronavirus, the White House says, making her the second person who works at the White House complex known to test positive for the virus this week.

A driver who smashed into a female cyclist, injuring her badly, then drove off should hand himself in, police say.

Thousands of people have flocked to shopping malls and supermarkets across Adelaide, raising concerns of growing complacency over the coronavirus pandemic.

The British government has told airlines it will introduce a 14-day quarantine period for most people arriving from abroad to try to avoid a second peak of the coronavirus pandemic, an association representing the airlines said on Saturday.

THE COVID-19 Omnibus (Emergency Measures) Bill 2020 passed.  The legislation “implements a range of temporary emergency measures to support Victorians and continue delivering the services we all rely on”.

One of my passions as a councillor and a key commitment to my community was to simplify local government processes and clarify what as unnecessarily complex. Break the obfuscation nexus, you may say.

Perhaps when COVID-19 is done and dusted the Victorian Government might apply some of the same tough, no nonsense attitude towards getting drug drivers off our roads.

‘Kudos’ is an interesting word.

Much has been written and discussed over the last few months around our present social environment.

This week I went to my first farewell for a co-worker on Zoom.

With the incredible efforts we’ve seen from healthcare workers during the COVID-19 pandemic, it feels appropriate that the World Health Organisation has made 2020 the Year of the Nurse and Midwife.

Welcome to the new world where global emergency collides with 21st century sloganism.

Since these middle schoolers have been sent home during the coronavirus shutdowns, they decided to lift each other's spirits by having some virtual fun.

The post Middle Schoolers Bust a Move From Home By Joining Together for Music Video Against COVID-19 Fears appeared first on Good News Network.

Two high school students, Matthew Casertano and Dhruv Pai used their time off from classes to deliver groceries to their neighbors in self-isolation.

The post Maryland Teens Go On Grocery Store Runs for Seniors and Vulnerable Neighbors Amid COVID-19 Fears appeared first on Good News Network.

Despite these Indiana neighbors being forced to stay isolated during the COVID-19 crisis, they have come up with a clever way of staying connected.

The post This Neighborhood Has Been Staying Connected During Social Distancing With Creative ‘I Spy’ Game appeared first on Good News Network.

These two siblings from New Jersey have managed to raise more than $2,200 in order to benefit their local businesses and healthcare workers.

The post New Jersey Teens Take Matters into Their Own Hands to Help First Responders and Small Businesses Amidst COVID-19 Crisis appeared first on Good News Network.

Sydney, 10, and her mom animated a kid video to suggests how schools can donate surplus protection equipment (PPE) during COVID-19 pandemic.

The post 10-Year-Old Seeks to Empower Other Kids During COVID-19 Pandemic appeared first on Good News Network.

Tanner Howe, a singer-songwriter from Huntington Beach, hoped that his performances would brighten up isolating neighborhoods—and he was 100% correct.

The post Musician Uses Truck Bed to Play Drive-By Concerts for Friends in Quarantine – and the Video is Incredibly Heartwarming appeared first on Good News Network.

This hardy senior has been sewing hundreds of homemade face masks for all her friends, family, and community members—all while jamming to The Beatles.

The post 89-Year-Old Sews 600 Masks While Listening to The Beatles – WATCH appeared first on Good News Network.

Harry Potter star Miriam Margolyes left British viewers shocked as she unleashed a vile rant saying she “wanted Boris Johnson to die” from the coronavirus.

Bike stunts, pet birthdays and a baby names which stumped the world are some of the trending topics on social media in Australia.

The New Zealand Cabinet will meet on Monday to decide whether restrictions can be eased allowing domestic travel to restart and most businesses to open. There have been four new recorded infections in the past five days, and 90 percent of approximately 1500 confirmed or probable cases, have recovered from the virus. As the New Zealand and Australian economies reopen, a Trans-Tasman travel bubble could emerge as a serious possibility, if both nations continue to effectively flatten their coronavirus curves. Image: Associated Press

President Donald Trump has joined World War Two veterans at a wreath laying ceremony commemorating the 75th anniversary of the end of World War Two in Europe. President Trump and First Lady Melania paid their respects at a memorial in Washington.

There’s been plenty of conspiracy theories to come out of the coronavirus pandemic.

Australians are being warned to take care when visiting their mums today, particularly if they are elderly.

Little Richard, one of the founding fathers of rock and roll, has died at the age of 87.

It’s the same story whether you’re a celeb or a pleb - we’re all getting on each other’s nerves in lockdown. And it’s the same story for Kim and Kanye.

When watching Formula One, it can be easy to forget these drivers are taking their lives in their own hands.

Royal Queensland’s return as Australian PGA host has been locked in for December 3-6 as part of a new wraparound summer season to shake up golf.

Everyone in the community feels isolated at the moment, but that's the way AFL coaches feel most of the time.

SAINTS

Netflix docu-series The Last Dance has kept basketball fans occupied while the sporting world goes into lockdown, with more than six million Americans tuning in to ESPN every week.

Horse Racing: In a day full of more great racing, Russian Camelot claimed the honours in the South Australian derby, with a few other shock results along the way.

Rupert Guinness is cycling across America — from his living room in Edgecliff.

Coaches are against plans for the NRL to revert back to one referee, with Raiders mentor Ricky Stuart already fearing the game has become “a 100m by 70m UFC ring”.

This will go down as the worst negotiation blunder in Australian sporting history.

Travellers should consider taking legal action to get money back

The federal government’s wage subsidy scheme may be wound back before its promised six month life span.

Supermarket giant Aldi has issued a warning to shoppers after a labelling mistake led to the recall of a deli meat product.

AMP has been forced to defend its plans for executive pay after frustrated shareholders moved to block the company’s 2019 renumeration report. The Finance Giant’s report has been voted down by a 67 percent majority at the company’s annual general meeting. The report stated the AMP’s Chief executive officer had been paid approximately four million dollars in 2019, despite the bank recording a four year net loss of 2.5 billion dollars in February.

Hoping your boss quits to play golf and you get their job? Not going to happen. Promotions at work will be few and far between for millennials as older workers refuse to vacate their positions, gumming up the job market.

Somewhere between 9.5 per cent and 44 per cent of the entire workforce is now really jobless as a result of the government-mandated lockdowns of the economy.

Commercial thinning in fully-stocked normal Douglas-fir stands of merchantable size is evaluated and compared to the alternatives of leaving stands to grow unthinned or of liquidating them. Comparisons are made in terms of volume production and financial returns.

Cofiring wood and coal at Fairbanks, Alaska, area electrical generation facilities represents an opportunity to use woody biomass from clearings within the borough's wildland-urban interface and from other sources, such as sawmill residues and woody material intended for landfills. Potential benefits of cofiring include air quality improvements, reduced greenhouse gas emissions, market and employment development opportunities, and reduction of municipal wood residues at area landfills. Important issues that must be addressed to enable cofiring include wood chip uniformity and quality, fuel mixing procedures, transportation and wood chip processing costs, infrastructure requirements, and long-term biomass supply. Additional steps in implementing successful cofiring programs could include test burns, an assessment of area biomass supply and treatment needs, and a detailed economic and technical feasibility study. Although Fairbanks North Star Borough is well positioned to use biomass for cofiring at coal burning facilities, long-term cofiring operations would require expansion of biomass sources beyond defensible-space-related clearings alone. Long-term sources could potentially include a range of woody materials including forest harvesting residues, sawmill residues, and municipal wastes.

Roads are important ecological features of forest landscapes, but their cause-andeffect relationships with other ecosystem components are only recently becoming included in integrated landscape analyses. Simulation models can help us to understand how forested landscapes respond over time to disturbance and socioeconomic factors, and potentially to address the important role roads play in these processes.

Production of high-quality water is a vitally important ecosystem service in the largely semiarid interior Columbia River basin (ICRB).

Agencies and organizations deploy various strategies in response to environmental challenges, including the formulation of policy, programs, and regulations. Citizen-based environmental stewardship is increasingly seen as an innovative and important approach to improving and conserving landscape health. A new research focus on the stewardship of urban natural resources is being launched by the U.S. Forest Service in the Pacific Northwest region. Early scoping efforts are addressing various scales of human systems ranging from individuals to organizations to the entire positive "footprint" of stewardship on the land. This report addresses a fundamental need—to understand and describe civic environmental stewardship in urban settings. Stewardship has been described and defined in diverse ways within a variety of contexts, including the philosophical literature of environmentalism, agency program descriptions, and outreach by sponsoring organizations. Constructing a framework to convey the layered meanings of stewardship will help to focus and guide future research. A cognitive mapping technique was used to elicit responses to the question "What is environmental stewardship?" Semistructured interviews were conducted with representatives of nine Seattle environmental organizations, a group of practitioners who collectively represent over 100 years of experience in the field. Program planners and managers have particularly direct experiences of stewardship. Cognitive mapping enables participants to explore, then display, their particular knowledge and perceptions about an idea or activity. Analysis generated thematic, structural representations of shared concepts. Results show that the practitioners have multilayered perceptions of stewardship, from environmental improvement to community building, and from actions to outcomes. The resulting conceptual framework demonstrates the full extent of stewardship activity and meaning, which can aid stewardship sponsors to improve stewardship programs, leading to better experiences for participants and higher quality outcomes for projects and environments.

We conducted an experimental study of infection, transmission, and persistence of a nucleopolyhedrovirus (NPV) of Douglas-fir tussock moth (Orgyia pseudotsugata) to better understand mechanisms determining the efficacy of the virus when it is used as a microbial control agent. In a field experiment, we quantified infection rates of larvae exposed to either Tussock Moth Biocontrol-1, the strain currently used for control by the U.S. Forest Service, or a wild-type strain isolated from a natural population. We first allowed each pathogen to decay on experimental branches for 0, 1, or 3 days before allowing uninfected larvae to feed on the branches, and then we fit both a generalized linear model and an epidemiological model of virus transmission to the infection data. Longer decay of the NPV resulted in lower infection rates, but evidence that overall virus transmission differed between wild and pesticide isolates of NPV was weak. The short persistence time of the virus suggests that it does not last long on foliage, in turn suggesting that application of TM Biocontrol-1 must be carefully timed to ensure maximum mortality.

Fungi are key players in the health, diversity, and productivity of forest ecosystems in Pacific Northwest forests, as mycorrhizal associations, pathogens, decomposers, nontimber resources, and food resources for wildlife. A number of invertebrate species are associated with wood decay fungi, serve as vectors for fungal pathogens, or are fungivorous (consume fungi) and influence rates of wood decay and nutrient mineralization. In Washington and Oregon, 31 wildlife species among 8 families are fungivores, and at least 14 wildlife species disperse fungi. Down wood can provide nurse substrates for seedlings and beneficial mycorrhizal fungi, refuges from pathogenic soil fungi, sources of nutrients for decay fungi, and substrates supporting overall fungal diversity. Presence, density, distribution, and diversity of fungi are influenced by forest stand management practices, forest age class, and effects of fire. Old forests provide for a suite of rare fungi species. Old legacy trees retained during forest harvest can provide some degree of conservation of beneficial and rare fungi. Fungi can be difficult to detect and monitor; surveying for fungi at various times of the year, for multiple (at least 5) years, and by including hypogeous (belowground) samples, can improve detection rates. Studies are needed in the Pacific Northwest to quantify the amount of down wood—number of pieces, sizes, total biomass, percentage of forest floor cover, and other attributes—necessary for maintaining or restoring fungal biodiversity and viable levels of individual fungi species, especially rare species.