Chaucer's Choice

Thousands of solar panels in the Needville area were destroyed in a heavy hail storm on March 16 and residents are concerned about possible chemical contamination. FOX 26's Randy Wallace reports more after speaking to community members.

 Business in The Australian Senate is engaged with madness from a Greens Senator over clocks in Parliament that tick!

Sky News host Chris Kenny warns Australia’s energy grids are far more “fragile” and "vulnerable” than they should be after thousands of Victorian homes were plunged into darkness on Tuesday. Parts of regional Victoria and Melbourne on Tuesday copped severe weather which brought down power lines, leaving hundreds of thousands of Victorians without power. Victorian Emergency Management Commissioner Rick Nugent warned it could potentially take up to a week for some houses and businesses to get their power back. Mr Kenny said the fragility of the energy grid also played a major role in the blackouts. “That's why there was load shedding, that's why there were widespread blackouts, that's why Victoria was frantically importing power from Tasmania, South Australia and NSW, and it's why the wholesale price in Victoria yesterday hit the market maximum of $16,600 a megawatt hour,” he said. “We always get hot and windy days, these are the days of high demand for electricity, these are the days of bushfire danger, these are what we get in an Australian summer and our system needs to be able to stand up to them much, much better than Victoria's did yesterday.”

Bruce Pascoe’s ‘Black Duck Foods’ charity has almost “burnt through” the $2.2 million in grants and donations received over the past four years, writer Tony Thomas says. Black Duck Foods is a charity that was set up to fund the running costs of Bruce Pascoe’s farm and revive what he describes as traditional food growing. Mr Thomas claimed the charity has only $200,000 left of the “free money”. “Within six months I’d say all that’ll be gone,” he told Sky News host Andrew Bolt. “Because it’s losing money at the rate of about a quarter of a million a year.”

The cost-of-living crunch is about to extend to pubs, bars and bottle shops. From Monday, a schooner of beer will set you back an extra 90 cents when the federal government taxes on alcohol are hiked again. The alcohol excise is automatically increased twice a year, based on inflation, with the tax expected to make $7.8 billion this financial year. Australia now has the third-highest beer tax in the world. Finland has the highest, and Norway the second.