Demand for a massive up-front payment is believed to be one reason why the federal government took so long to get the Pfizer vaccine here in Australia.

Nurses and doctors from overseas will be granted exemptions to enter Australia to try and combat a staff shortage in regional hospitals.

Facebook is suffering another outage, just days after several of its major services went down.

In sport, The Ashes will go ahead in Australia.

And in entertainment news, Adele's new album won't feature any other artists.