The impact of the crash forced the passenger of the car, a woman, 71, into the back seat.

A MAGISTRATE has described the driving record of a Howlong woman as woeful.

Narelle Crumpton has committed seven major driving offences since 2012 and magistrate Tony Murray said jail loomed as a possibility.

But he relented, instead imposing a three-month suspended jail term after being told Crumpton was a single mother with children aged 11 and 12 and cares for a 15-month-old grandson.

A FAKE $100 note was handed to an employee at a Lavington fast food restaurant on Monday night.

The counterfeit note was cashed about 8pm and was not identified as an imitation until the till was being counted later in the night. 

Albury Inspector David Cottee said there had been a recent spike in people using counterfeit notes to pay for goods in Corowa and Albury. 

THE family of a young footballer is thankful that his neck injury isn’t as bad as first thought.

Lavington thirds player Ashleigh Crow is in a neck brace and will likely miss the rest of the season.

But Crow’s grandfather Bill Scammell admitted that the incident in Saturday’s under-18s match with Wangaratta at the Norm Minns Oval could have been much worse.

A CHANGE in weather was all that could halt a stunning final round surge by Marcus Fraser at the British Open.

Despite the anticlimactic, climatic conditions Fraser still had his best finish to a major championship with a tie for 20th at St Andrews early Tuesday morning earning him more than $125,000.

Need a national news snapshot first thing - well, we have you covered. 

► ROCHERLEA, TAS: A KNIFE-WIELDING and drug-fuelled Launceston man who barricaded himself inside a Rocherlea family’s home for almost 12 hours on Tuesday is expected to face a string of charges. In the early hours of Tuesday, the 41-year-old man entered a woman’s home in Waratah Road while her son and two others were present. The group was able to escape the ordeal before sunrise, but the man refused to give himself up until 1.48pm.

► BALLARAT, VIC: JOSH Coward's prospects of a professional rugby career just got a whole lot better. The St Patrick's College boarding student and captain of the school team has been picked to represent Australia at the Commonwealth Youth Games, to be held in Samoa during September.

► NYNGAN, NSW: A PREGNANT woman was allegedly sprayed with pepper spray, tied up, gagged and burnt with a heated knife blade by her partner in "extremely serious" new allegations before Dubbo Local Court. The victim sustained injuries including burn marks and pin pricks to her arm during an alleged series of attacks across two days.

► CAPALABA, QLD: A MEMORIAL to First World War serviceman and Australian flying ace Bert Hinkler will soon be unveiled at the site of his death on Mount Pratomagno near Florence, Italy, due in large part to the efforts of Capalaba resident Kevin Lindeberg. Until recently, Mr Lindeberg was the only Australian who knew where Hinkler's de Havilland Puss Moth crashed, killing the flying ace in the Italian Alps in 1933, and where his body was found.

► SECRET HARBOUR, WA:  MADI Molloy’s diagnosis is almost as long as she is. But that doesn’t mean the 11-year-old won’t fight it with everything she’s got. Diagnosed in February 2014 with stage four glioblastoma, Madi has been through 10 rounds of chemotherapy and six weeks of radiation. She has had two surgeries and been told there was nothing more doctors could do to help her. But that was before renowned surgeon Charlie Teo stepped in. Read more.

► MOUNT ISA, QLD: BOB Katter has gone into bat for the clean energy sector after Prime Minister Tony Abbott announced a change to the mandate of the Clean Energy Finance Corporation to not fund wind farms or small scale solar projects and stating it was government policy to abolish the CEFC. The CEFC acts as a public bank and lends on a commercial basis and has $10 billion to invest in renewable energy projects and has already deployed $1 billion. CEFC has a pipeline of investment for renewable projects in the Kennedy electorate conservatively estimated at half a billion dollars. Read more.

► PARKES, NSW: THE Breakthrough Prize Foundation has signed a multi-million dollar agreement with CSIRO to use the organisation’s 64 metre Parkes radio telescope to search for extraterrestrial intelligence. The search will use 25 per cent of the telescope’s time for five years from July 2016 and will return CSIRO the cost of operating the telescope during the observations as well as contributing to an upgrade of the data systems used for this and other science. Read more.

► WINDALE, NSW: DOWNTRODDEN. Much-maligned. Perennially disadvantaged. Full of Department of Housing homes, junkies and dole-bludgers. That’s Windale. At least, that’s its reputation according to those looking at it from the outside in. Those who live there paint a different picture entirely. They are proud to call 2306 home. They point to the success stories you never hear about and the community spirit found in every street. Read more.

► AMBARVALE, NSW: AN AMBARVALE man caught travelling at a whopping 220km/h along the Princes Highway with his partner and two sons in the car has had his jail sentence overturned in a District Court appeal. The 28-year-old man, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was allowed to return home to his children on Tuesday after the five-month prison term handed to him in the Local Court in June was extended to eight months, then wholly suspended, on account of his need to provide around-the-clock care to one of the sons who was chronically ill. Read more.

► West Australian Liberal MP Don Randall has been found dead. Mr Randall was found dead in his car in Boddington, a small town in his electorate, south of Perth. It's understood Mr Randall suffered a heart attack. He was 62. Prime Minister Tony Abbott said he was shocked and saddened to learn of the MP's death and expressed his condolences on behalf of the government and Liberal Party for Mr Randall's wife Julie and their two children.

► Opposition Leader Bill Shorten is set to unveil a bold climate policy goal requiring half of Australia's large-scale energy production to be generated using renewable sources within 15 years. Fairfax Media has learnt that despite Labor's humiliating 2013 election defeat caused in part by voter contempt for its carbon tax, Mr Shorten will use this weekend's ALP national conference in Melbourne to announce the even more ambitious goal, dramatically beefing up Labor's renewable energy target. Read more.

► Prime Minister Tony Abbott is refusing to say how a suspected boat of Vietnamese asylum seekers penetrated Australia's newly strengthened border regime, as refugee advocates urge the government not to turn the arrivals away. The vessel was allegedly sighted by the crew of a tanker about 150 kilometres from Dampier, Western Australia, early on Monday morning.

► Oh-oh-oh, it's a working class ban. Cold Chisel front man Jimmy Barnes has a message for those playing his classic Australian songs at anti-Islam rallies around the country: stop. In a message posted on his Facebook page, Barnes said it had come to his attention that "certain groups of people" had been playing his songs at rallies. Two anti-Islam groups, the United Patriots Front and Reclaim Australia, have been staging rallies around the country brandishing Australian flags and protesting the "spread" of Islam, halal food and Asian immigration. Barnes, whose wife Jane was born in Thailand, is the lead singer of Cold Chisel. Read more.

► July 22, 2011: Norwegian right-wing extremist Anders Behring Breivik committed two terrorist attacks in Norway. The first, in Oslo, was a car bomb explosion within the city's executive government quarter. The attack killed eight people and injured more than 200 others. A second attack followed less than two hours later, at a summer camp on the island of Utøya. A Norwegian Labour Party youth division had organised the camp. Breivik dressed in a police uniform and showed false identification to get access to the island. He then opened fire at the camp participants, killing 69 people and injuring more than 100. In the end, 77 people died as a result of the two attacks -  the deadliest in Norway since the Second World War. Breivik admitted he was behind the attacks but denied criminal guilt. In August 2012, he was convicted and sentenced to 21 years of preventive detention in prison. This sentence can be repeatedly extended by five years as long as he is considered a threat to society. Learn more about the attacks below:

► CROATIA: Three Australian men have been arrested over an alleged rape of an 18-year-old Norwegian woman in the toilets of a nightclub in Split, Croatia. According to the Dalmatia News the men, aged in their early 20s, have had their passports confiscated but are not currently in custody, pending further investigation. They were reported to have claimed that the sexual contact with the Norwegian woman was voluntary.

► PACIFIC: The El Nino continues to strengthen in the Pacific, exceeding by at least one measure the monster event of 1997-98, according to the Bureau of Meteorology. All the key regions of the equatorial Pacific used to monitor El Ninos have recorded sea-surface temperatures of 1 degree above average for 10 consecutive weeks, two weeks longer than the previous record set in 1997, the bureau said in its fortnightly El Nino update. The temperature anomalies stretch from the South American coastline all the way to north-east Australia, or to about the 160-degrees east region. Read more.

► BEIJING, CHINA: A former top Chinese government official who was sidelined from the top reaches of power after his son died in a notorious Ferrari crash in Beijing in 2012 has been expelled from the Communist Party and referred for prosecution over corruption and other crimes. Ling Jihua, 58, who was once the top aide to former President Hu Jintao​, had committed numerous violations of "party discipline", according to the official Xinhua News Agency. The violations included accepting bribes, wrongly obtaining state secrets and committing adultery with multiple women. Read more.

APSLEY AFL product Reg Burgess has spoken about his love for the Essendon Football Club and his experience of moving away from the country to pursue a career in football.

Burgess was last month inducted into the Bombers' Hall of Fame and admitted he was shocked to be named among the club's greatest players.

"I feel privileged to be inducted into the Essendon Hall of Fame - it's the greatest football club in Australia, no doubt," he said. "I never thought I would be considered for such an honour - magnificent.

"Coming from a small country town to Essendon in those days wasn't very easy.

"I had to leave all my friends behind, go down there and accept this challenge." Read more.