☕️ Booktopia finds a buyer

If you had a bad day at work yesterday, at least it likely wasn’t as bad as the person in the NSW Liberal Party who missed their deadline and now more than 100 Liberal Party candidates can’t run for council in the upcoming local elections.

If you’ve seen this story around and not quite sure what has happened, today’s podcast is for you.

You’ll never want to miss a deadline again!

“Credit where credit’s due, none of this would have been possible without the vision [former NSW Premiers] Mike Baird, Gladys Berejiklian, and Dominic Perrottet had for Sydney. This achievement belongs just as much to you.”
NSW Premier Chris Minns on the opening of a new train line in Sydney from Sydenham to Chatswood.

7,300
How many scam websites the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) has taken down since July 2023. Most of the sites were investment scams.

2020
Kamala Harris accepted her nomination as Vice President, becoming the first woman of colour on the ticket of a main political party in the U.S. This week, Harris will be accepting her presidential nomination at the Democratic National Convention.

The owner of Australian electronics retailer digiDirect has bought out Booktopia, Australia’s largest online bookseller.

It comes after the platform went into voluntary administration last month.

Booktopia’s value has declined significantly since it became a publicly listed company on the ASX in 2020, with its share price dropping from $2.30 to 4.5 cents.

Its new owner is set to hire 100 new employees to “enable the immediate resumption” of sales.

Booktopia announced a planned restructure in June, including at least 50 possible job cuts.

The following month, independent administrators were appointed to wrap up operations or sell it.

The Australian book-selling platform lost money in the 2021/22 and 2022/23 financial years.

Its latest financial statement showed further losses for the last six months of 2023.

digiDirect owner Shant Kradjian has taken over Booktopia. It’s not clear how much the company paid for the online retailer.

Administrators said they would facilitate meetings with people and companies to whom Booktopia owed money when it entered administration.

This suggests the sale price wasn’t enough to resolve the company’s debts.

Reporting by Achol Arok.

Lost productivity due to long COVID cost the Australian economy $9.6 billion in 2022, new research has found.

According to the Department of Health, “long COVID is where symptoms of COVID-19 remain, or develop long after your acute illness“.

Researchers from UNSW, ANU and the University of Melbourne calculated the number of lost labour hours due to workers’ ongoing COVID-19 symptoms in 2022.

The joint study found long COVID had a “significant” impact on the workforce.

Symptoms of long COVID can include fatigue, headache, coughing, shortness of breath, insomnia and brain fog. Symptoms can last for weeks or sometimes months.

People with underlying conditions are at higher risk for long-term complications from COVID-19, according to the Health Department’s online resource ‘Healthdirect’.

Studies are continuing to investigate why some people develop long COVID while others do not.

New research published in The Medical Journal of Australia found that up to 1.3 million Australians were affected by long COVID at the height of the pandemic, in September 2022.

The study found long COVID had “significant” health and economic impacts, “especially on working adults,” resulting in on average, roughly 100 million lost labour hours in 2022.

“This is equivalent to an average loss of eight hours per employed person, per year, including both full-time and part-time employment,” Professor Quentin Grafton from ANU said.

The research found that 30 to 49-year-old workers with long COVID had the greatest economic impact, contributing to more than 50% of total labour and productivity lost in 2022.

The study estimated economy-wide losses worth about 25% of Australia’s real gross domestic product growth for 2022.

However, Professor Grafton noted the economic impact of long COVID could be much higher, as the research doesn’t account for losses “such as healthy employees who can’t work because they’re caring for others with long COVID.”

Researchers urged the Government to make long COVID policies a priority. This included calls for broader access to vaccines and boosters.

The study found current policies make it “difficult for younger, healthy people to access boosters or antivirals.”

In addition, it suggested efforts to improve indoor air quality to reduce the spread of disease.

Professor Raina MacIntyre from UNSW also called for financial assistance for Australians who are “unable to work because of their symptoms”.

Reporting by Chloe Christie.

Feeling like your weekly grocery shop, dinner out with friends, and everything in between is breaking the bank?

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With discounts at over 2,500 places across Australia, EatClub is your key to dining out on a budget. Download EatClub here.

Malaria parasites feed on cholesterol. Scientists used this to their advantage to essentially “trick” malaria parasites into consuming too much of it.

The newly-coined “trojan horse method” fights the parasite by deliberately giving it a lethal drug dosage. This development paves the way for future malaria treatments, and could also be used in the agricultural industry to treat infected livestock.

Want more good news? Sign up to our weekly Good Newsletter here - we promise it’ll make your week better!

Reporting by Nandini Dhir.

"I was going to sail around the globe in the world’s smallest ship, but I bottled it."

The UK public has voted that one-liner by comedian Mark Simmons the best joke at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

For those unfamiliar with the Fringe, it’s a comedy/performance festival that takes over the Scottish city of Edinburgh every August. It’s launched the careers of many of your favourites, including Phoebe Waller-Bridge, whose series Fleabag started out as a Fringe show, and Richard Gadd, whose autobiographical one-man show turned into a Netflix original you might be familiar with — Baby Reindeer.

Each year, the UK public votes on a selection of jokes from shows at the Festival to determine the 10 funniest. Aussie Zoë Coombs Marr came in eighth with: “My partner told me that she’d never seen the film Gaslight. I told her that she definitely had.”

The TDA office favourite was number 10, UK comedian Sophie Duker, who said that new Prime Minister “Keir Starmer looks like an AI-generated image of a substitute teacher.”

Reporting by Nandini Dhir.

At least 138 Liberal Party candidates won’t run in the upcoming NSW local council elections, after essential paperwork wasn’t filed on time. The party's state director has already been fired for the error.

Now, the NSW Liberal Party is now threatening to take legal action against the state’s electoral commission. In today's podcast, we explain the political saga and what the Liberals think should happen next.