Hello team, hope you had good weekends.

1. Just in this morning: Australia has provisionally approved the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine, meaning it can now be imported and rolled out. “Following a thorough and independent review of Pfizer’s submission, the TGA has decided that this vaccine meets the high safety, efficacy and quality standards required for use in Australia,” the TGA announcement read.

2. Digital vaccine certificates could be a way to bring large numbers of international students into Australian universities without quarantine, Education Minister Alan Tudge said. “If a vaccine works and stops the spread, and it can be rolled out effectively in source countries and we can have surety over vaccination certificates, then there is the potential to be able to bring in more international students without them having to quarantine,” Tudge told The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.

3. Victoria recorded six new COVID-19 cases in hotel quarantine, and zero community transmission for the 19th day in a row. Western Australia is considering relaxing restrictions for travellers from Victoria sooner than was originally planned.

4. In case you missed it on Friday: Google Australia boss Melanie Silva told a Senate Committee that the company could pull its search engine out of Australia. The threat comes as the tech giant demands the federal government change or scrap proposed legislation that would compel it to pay local media companies for displaying hyperlinks to their content. Facebook is making similar threats, saying it will block Australian users from sharing news links.

5. The federal government should permanently boost the JobSeeker payment despite promising new employment figures, says the Australian Council of Social Service (ACOSS). Fresh jobs data last week revealed the unemployment rate dropped 0.2% in December to 6.6%, but advocates say those promising numbers don’t tell the whole story. The JobSeeker Coronavirus Supplement, which has faced successive cuts, is set to expire at the end of March.

6. New Zealand reported its first case of local transmission of COVID-19 in more than two months. However, there’s no current evidence that it is spreading through the community. The case is in a 56-year-old woman who recently returned from Europe.

7. About 5,000 members of the U.S. National Guard will remain stationed in Washington DC through Trump’s impeachment trial. The trial is set to begin in early February, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said. Members of the National Guard were stationed in DC after the riot at the US Capitol.

8. Tesla on Friday filed a complaint accusing an engineer of stealing trade secrets. The company said engineer Alex Khatilov was hired on December 28 and began transferring files within days. Khatilov became the latest person in Silicon Valley to be accused by the company of trade secret theft – former Tesla employees working at Zoox were sued in 2019, for example.

9. Bitcoin fell back below the US$32,000 support level on Sunday as the cryptocurrency’s trading range narrowed further. The token has steadily fallen from its early January highs as experts warn of a market bubble and investors secure profits. Still, prices sit roughly 11% higher year-to-date and some analysts expect the cooling volatility to attract more investors.

10. Wall Street analysts expect Apple’s quarterly revenue to top $100 billion for the first time. Morgan Stanley, for example, expect “a record December quarter print.” The average revenue estimate is $102.76 billion, according to analysts polled by Yahoo Finance.

BONUS ITEM

A few months old now, but a very interesting read if you missed it the first time around:

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