National Stroke Week

Dear Echo News,

I want to extend our heartfelt thanks to newsrooms, journalists, producers and editors across Australia who helped share our life-saving message during National Stroke Week 2025 (4–10 August).

By sharing the F.A.S.T. message on air and online, through stories in print, broadcast interviews with experts, survivors of stroke and their families and carers, you played a vital role in educating Australians about the signs of stroke and the importance of acting quickly.

When stroke strikes, it attacks up to 1.9 million brain cells per minute.

Thanks to your support, millions of Australians are now better equipped to recognise the F.A.S.T. signs of stroke and know to call the ambulance without delay: Face – Check their face. Has their mouth drooped? Arms – Can they lift both arms? Speech – Is their speech slurred? Do they understand you? Time – Time is critical. Call 000 immediately.

Every National Stroke Week story you shared has the potential to save a life.

You have helped amplify the message that stroke can happen to anyone, at any age, and that fast action is the key to survival and recovery.

From everyone at Stroke Foundation, and on behalf of the more than 440,000 Australians living with the impact of stroke around Australia — thank you for standing with us this National Stroke Week!

Dr Lisa Murphy

Chief Executive Officer

Stroke Foundation

Congrats for Echo’s 40th

Dear Echo News,

Congratulations to Echo News for standing the test of time after 40 years.

I’ve written many a letter and had local issues highlighted in articles of which I am truly grateful.

It’s great to see a local community newspaper keeping it local and thriving after so many years. Many thanks for your community support.

G Coleman

Bassendean

Echo News social media comments

In response to Dayton urban water management concerns: 

L Deering: 

If we are not careful that’s all that will remain: a street name. Minus the ability to grow fruit due to water table rise and fall. Developers not responsible, council planners out of step and no responsibility. Idiocy! Missing verges, proper run off drainage and they keep flattening landscape, covering it in concrete and bricks.

In response to Perth Hills LGAs oppose Alcoa lease:

V Seebeck:

In 60 years of mining, Alcoa have not met the criteria set out by the WA government for rehabilitation of jarrah forests. Bauxite mining undermines the topsoil that our jarrah/marri/wandoo ecological communities have evolved with. Research has shown that it changes the soil profile, causes erosion, spreads dieback, increases the risk of salinity and destroys the mycorrhizal layer that underpins forest health (the mycorrhizal layer can take up to 40 years to recover). They often store the topsoil for up to eight years before extracting the bauxite and replacing the depleted soil. With the moisture-holding bauxite removed, rehabilitated forests can only produce small, thin jarrah stems, with shallow root systems, which don’t appear to improve over time, especially in our drying climate. Alcoa can’t reproduce the large old growth forests with the necessary breeding hollows, microclimates, leaf litter layer, dead trees etc. that our black cockatoos, woylies, quokkas, numbats, phascogales and possums rely on. Rehab has also failed to return the original species composition in the understory, which these animals need for food and shelter. Mining of the last of our jarrah forests would especially be a death knell for our critically endangered species, which are already on a knife edge.