Thursday's news in under 5 minutes.

1. Boy hospitalised after water slide fall

A five-year-old boy is in hospital with serious head injuries, after falling from a water slide in Perth’s North.

The little boy was at the Outback Splash water park when he came off a slide midway and smashed his head on concrete.

It is understood he was on the slide with his father at the time.

Mason McDonald’s mother Hayley posted on Facebook that her son had fractures to his skull.

“Our son Mason is slowly improving and has been to hell and back as have we, his family,” she wrote. “He is alive only as a result of the multiple medical trauma teams who treated him at two major hospitals in Perth. He has fractures to his skull and other injuries as a result of his fall from height on to concrete.

We are unsure of how his memory, speech, seizures etc etc will develop over the next few months. We have many specialist medical depts working with him”.

Channel 7 reports that a former nurse came to his aid when she saw him fling from the slide “like a little ragdoll through the air”.

“He came off at one of the bends, probably the last bend.”

The park has now been re-opened but the blue slide Mason came off remains closed.

2. Phillip Hughes laid to rest

The family of cricketer Phillip Hughes has walked shoulder-to-shoulder along side the Prime Minister, Australian cricket team captain Michael Clarke, the cricket community and the town of Macksville as they said goodbye to the cricketer at his funeral yesterday.

For more:

-Michael Clarke’s moving eulogy

-Holly Wainwright on the friendship between Michael Clarke and Phillip Hughes.

-Coverage of the funeral.
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 3. Bill Cosby sued

Bill Cosby is being sued by a woman who claims the comedian molested her in a bedroom of the Playboy Mansion around 1974 when she was 15 years old.

Cosby has been accused by multiple women of sexual misconduct in recent weeks but this is the first lawsuit Cosby has faced since sexual abuse claims began in 2005.

The woman, Judy Huth claims in a lawsuit filed in California that she and a 16-year-old friend first met Cosby at a Los Angeles area film shoot and that Cosby took them to the Playboy Mansion after several drinks.

Her lawsuit states Cosby forced her to perform a sex act on him with his hand.

“This traumatic incident, at such a tender age, has caused psychological damage and mental anguish for (Huth) that has caused significant problems throughout her life,” the lawsuit states.

4. Funeral for brave German woman

Crowds have gathered in Germany for the funeral of Tugce Albayrak who was killed defending two girls from harassment.

Tugce Albayrak died on Friday after she was hit on the head and left in a coma outside a McDonald’s near Frankfurt.

The funeral took place at a mosque in Waechtersbach and was attended by Hesse’s state Prime Minister Volker Bouffier.

An 18-year-old man remains in custody over the 15 November attack, which shocked Germany.

For more on Tugce Albayrak read this post here.

5. 2014 hottest year on record

2014 is set to be the hottest year on record said the World Meteorological Organization overnight.

Speaking from Lima the WMO said, “The year 2014 is on track to be one of the hottest, if not the hottest, on record. ”

“Provisional data for 2014 shows that 14 out of the 15 warmest years on record have all occurred in the 21st century”

WMO chief Michel Jarraud said, “There is no standstill in global warming. What we saw in 2014 is consistent with what we expect from a changing climate. Record-breaking heat, combined with torrential rainfall and floods, destroyed livelihoods and ruined lives.”

In Australia we have just had the hottest October and November on record according to the Bureau of Meteorology.

Australia’s maximum temperatures were 2.76 degrees warmer in October 2014 than the average.

Overall, it was the hottest Spring on record.

 6. Mother jailed for shaking baby

A mother who shook her 11-week-old baby so hard he bled from his eyes has been sentenced.

The UK mother sent a text message to her husband shortly before the incident saying “They’ve pissed me off, they’ve both gone crazy, I’m going to throw [the baby] into a wall soon.”

For more read this post here.

 7. Jacqui Lambie apologises

Jacqui Lambie has been forced to apologise after interrupting Senate tributes for cricketer Phillip Hughes.

Senator Lambie cut short a move to honour the young cricketer trying instead to force a rushed debate on her private bill to raise defence force pay.

Lambie has since said “I apologise to Phillip Hughes’s family and friends if my misunderstanding over Senate procedure has offended them. This must be a very difficult and sad day for them. The speeches given in the Senate for Phillip were magnificent and inspirational”

 8. Aussie families to sue over MH17

News Limited reports that eight Australian families are preparing to sue Russia, Ukraine, Malaysia and Malaysian Airlines over the loss of their loved ones.

Aviation Lawyer Jerry Skinner is representing the eight families from New South Wales, Canberra, Victoria, Queensland and South Australia.

“Everybody has a pretty good idea of why the plane crashed,” Mr Skinner told News Limited.

“What we need is the political information obtained that identifies the actors who made the operational decisions.”

9. Sydney woman could face execution

A young Sydney woman, Kalynda Davis, along with a man named Peter Gardner will face court this week in China after being accused of trying to smuggling 75kg of methamphetamine into Australia and could face the death penalty.

22-year-old Kalynda Davis from Penrith in Sydney’s West was reported missing by a family member on November 5 after she failed to return from a trip to China said NSW Police.

According to Channel Nine the pair were booked to fly back to Sydney early in November but were arrested at the airport by Chinese authorities and never boarded the flight.

The Daily Mail has reported that the pair are due to face a Chinese court later this week.

10. Child abuse Royal Commission: Mindset of NSW yoga retreat ‘as dangerous as ever’, witness tells hearing

By the ABC’s Nicole Chettle

A former resident at Australia’s oldest yoga Ashram has received applause after delivering a passionate call for justice at the child sexual abuse Royal Commission in Sydney.

The commission has been looking at the handling of 11 complaints made against former spiritual leader Swami Akhandananda Saraswati over the past 40 years, relating to abuse that happened in the 1970s and ’80s.

One woman known as APK, who, along with her sister, endured years of physical and sexual abuse.

“It didn’t resolve it for me, and I know it didn’t resolve it for my family,” she said.

She wrote to the organisation and said “to suggest healing has occurred when those whose lives were affected weren’t even there is ridiculous”.

“How nice for you that you feel healed. But your little fire ceremony does nothing for me or my family,” she said.

“This is not something to be wrapped up in a pretty ribbon and healed by singing Kirtan around a fire pit … frankly this fluff you have written is an insult to the people who truly suffered.”

APK said the victims were still scarred by the abuse.

“It is also particularly insulting that you would spout off this rubbish about ego and embracing your darkness – all the same Samsara bulls**t that Swami Akhandananda spouted while f***ing little girls and stealing people’s lives,” she said.

“The mindset of the ashram hasn’t changed and it is as dangerous as it ever was.”

Akhandananda was convicted on charges of indecency and jailed in 1989, but his conviction was overturned in 1991. He died in 1997.

“I know financial compensation won’t make any of the trauma go away, but I want to hit the ashram where it hurts,” APK said.

“I think the only way to make them understand their failure is to make them pay compensation.”

 A version of this story was originally published on ABC and has been republished with full permission 

11. Women better off giving birth outside of hospital says UK

In the UK the National Health Service has issued some unexpected birthing advice – saying that women with low-risk pregnancies are better giving birth at home or in midwife-led centres than in hospital – except for first time mothers.

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence has claimed that more women should be encouraged to give birth out of hospitals, as they say in the UK the outcome for the baby is no different to being born in a traditional labour ward – except for first-time mothers.

Stats in the UK say that a midwifery unit or a hospital, a baby born with a serious medical complication might occur in 5 out of every 1,000 births, but this rises to 9 in every 1,000 for home births for first-time mothers.

This does obviously not include free birthing where no medical help is provided.

The 45% of women who have a low-risk of developing complications during their pregnancy may be better off giving birth elsewhere and should be given more options by medical professionals.

Factors that increase the risk of complications during birth include -being over 35, obesity, high blood pressure, and complications in previous pregnancies.

 12. Phone charged in 30 seconds? Thank you very much.

Now this is news we need. An Israel-based company is developing a way to fully charge a dead battery in just 30 seconds.

StoreDot, which is based in Tel Aviv, says it has created a new ‘nanodot’ which can breathe new life into a dead battery with barely any waiting around.

If all goes well, it is hoped it will be on the market as soon as 2016.

13. Mothers damage daughters through unrealistic expectations

A study has claimed that women cannot have it all and that young girls and woman have unrealistic expectations when they believe they can have a career, motherhood and beauty.

The British study by the Centre for Appearance Research at the University of West of England found that it is many mothers who ‘transmit’ anxiety to their daughters and make them self-conscious about their image.

Researchers wrote, “Today there is a cultural rhetoric of girls and women ‘having it all’. These exhortations impinge on girls and on mothers in ways that create excitement and anxiety “ reports The Daily Mail. 

“They make it sound as though women can have it all. This is unrealistic and sets up expectations in complex ways within the mother daughter relationship and in women in general. It may include a mother’s inadvertent foisting on a daughter ambitions that, for herself, remain personally unfulfilled.

The study found that 1 in 5 girls would avoid putting their hand up in school for fear that people would look at them and pass judgment on their appearance.