Good morning, folks, and hold tight.

1. Melbourne looks almost certain to enter another lockdown on Thursday, the Sydney Morning Herald reports. A source in the Victorian government reportedly confirmed that cabinet would finalise details of the lockdown this morning before announcing it to the public. It comes as the number of active cases in the state grew to 34 overnight, close contacts hit 300, and the number of exposure sites climbed to almost 80.

2. The Morrison government should apologise to Christine Holgate and show the chair of Australia Post the door, a Senate Committee has found. It also recommended Communications Minister Paul Fletcher be investigated for directing “without directing” that the Australia Post board dismiss Holgate as CEO last year. Tying up a more than six-month inquiry, it all came about over four Cartier watches.

3. It may be about to get a whole lot harder for first time buyers to get into the property market. New data forecasts house prices will rise 10 times quicker than wages this year, making it harder for the average Australian to get into the market. Economists say the government isn’t interested in changing that, as more voters own houses than don’t. Sobering.

4. Boris Johnson’s failings in containing the coronavirus have been laid bare by his former aide. Dominic Cummings told British Parliament that BoJo wanted to be injected with the virus on live TV to show it’s nothing to be scared of and believed lockdowns would do nothing to prevent its spread. He also claimed that Trump’s insistence the UK bomb the Middle East derailed public health measures.

5. Belarus authorities have released another ‘confession’ video, this time of dissident journalist Roman Protasevich’s girlfriend. After using a bogus security threat to ground their departing flight and arrest the two, authorities have been showing footage of the two looking worse for wear and admitting to stirring up protests, quite likely under duress. Here’s how Protasevich became one of Belarusian President and strongman Alexander Lukashenko’s main adversaries.

6. GameStop is building an NFT platform as part of an ambitious plan to transform itself into the Amazon of gaming. The company which has seen its valuation pumped up by its new found celebrity on Reddit forums says it is now hiring big to get the project off the ground.

7. Amazon has bought studio MGM for $US8.45 billion, finalising a deal that has long been in the works. Curiously, it would give the company the rights to the unaired footage of then-reality TV star Donald Trump allegedly acting badly during “The Apprentice” days. The tapes are still prohibited however from being aired publicly.

8. The ATO is warning it is coming for crypto investors this financial year. Any profits made through trading will be scrutinised, as “prices have rocketed and we have seen a lot more people investing in them, particularly in the past 12 to 18 months,” an assistant commissioner at the ATO said. It comes as two different exchanges close major sponsorship deals with the AFL in an effort to take crypto mainstream.

9. The company behind Ripple wants to go public, potentially making cryptocurrency history.Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse said it’s highly likely it would happen, but first it needs to finish a long.-running feud with regulators in the US.

10. Losing their jobs during the pandemic led these two friends to start a booming business. Craving bubble tea at home and realising no one was really supplying the ingredients in Australia, Pamela Yip and Jenny Le founded the Bubble Tea Club, making more than $2 million in sales in its first year. “We just wanted to keep busy. Some people make banana bread, we made a business,” they told Business Insider Australia.

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Damn.

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