Strawberry needles found in NZ, ABC chief Michelle Guthrie sacked, and more top news

Needles have been found in Australian strawberries sold in New Zealand, jeopardising Australia’s reputation as a safe food supplier. The Western Australian Choice brand strawberries were pulled from the shelves of an Auckland supermarket this weekend and authorities were contacted. Choice is not one of the brands pulled for fear of contamination in Australia, which have so far all been from Queensland. Australia relies on its reputation as a safe food provider when trading products like milk and baby formula in Asia.

ABC Managing Director Michelle Guthrie has been sacked. Guthrie had been in the role less than three years of a five-year term when the station’s directors said it was “not in the best interests of the ABC for Ms Guthrie to continue to lead the organisation”. Guthrie was the ABC's first female managing director and previously worked at Google in Singapore. Director of Entertainment and Specialist David Anderson will act in the role in the interim.

More than $12bn has been wiped from the value of major listed banks, wealth managers and insurers this year. The Banking Royal Commission, which revealed widespread unethical behaviour including money laundering and charging deceased customers, has been blamed for the fall in share prices across Australia’s largest institutions. Fairfax reports financial stocks were down 2.3% since February, compared with a 15.8% jump in the remaining ASX200 businesses. Meanwhile the commission was planning on delivering its interim report to the government by Sunday.

Social media and cloud computing is behind a huge push for more data centres, which already account for about 4% of Australia’s total energy consumption. IBM Asia Pacific vice-president of strategy Deon Newman told Fairfax data centres were expected to be the next big boom industry as cryptocurrency exchanges required more processing power. He said: “The reality is we're generating enormous amounts of data every single day; in two days we’re generating the same amount of information from year zero to 2005.”

Australia ranks number 35 on the global gender pay gap index. Australian Gender Equality Council statistics showed women still earned 23% less than men, women retired with 42% less superannuation than men and one-in-two women were discriminated against at work for being mothers. Council chair and Former Westpac executive Victoria Weekes said: "I am unapologetically a believer in quotas. They're misunderstood as not involving merit. If we didn't believe there was merit in the other half of society we'd actually be saying women can't make as good a contribution as men.”

Idea of the Day: Recognising mental and emotional distress in ourselves, as well as our colleagues, is critical to successful living, advises Aetna president Karen S. Lynch.

“As we work to help others, we must remember to take time for ourselves.”

What's your take on today’s stories? Share your thoughts in the comments.

— Cayla Dengate

This article has been changed. Earlier: Machines and algorithms are poised to displace 75m jobs globally over the next decade.