Fuel shortages in Bali have triggered kilometre-long lines outside petrol stations, disrupting everyday business and raising concerns for thousands of Australian travellers holidaying on the Indonesian island.

Drivers say they have been forced to spend hours waiting for fuel, while some service stations report dwindling supplies. Roadside sellers, who commonly supply petrol in bottles, are also struggling to restock.

Bali petrol remains relatively cheap, costing about 90 Australian cents a litre compared with Australia’s average of $2.46. However, limited availability has placed increasing pressure on motorists across the island.

Australian expats Chad and Mia Dickson, who relocated from Townsville to Bali with their four children in 2024, are among those affected by the disruption.

The couple posted footage online showing a seemingly endless line of cars and motorbikes waiting to reach a petrol pump.

“We’ve already been waiting for about 40 minutes now and we are pretty empty,” Ms Dickson said.

One visitor told Seven News that his wife had joined the queue before dawn and waited several hours before she could fill the vehicle.

“This morning, my wife lined up at 4.30am and waited for two-and-a-half hours before finally being able to refuel. It’s crazy,” he said.

The shortage has begun to interfere with normal life in several parts of Bali, according to Sydney-based travel and food creator The Travelling Foodie.

“Over the last few days, stations across Denpasar, Badung and other parts of the island have been running low or completely dry, with some queues stretching for ages,” he said.

He said he travelled from Seminyak to Berawa and Canggu without finding a single roadside fuel vendor with petrol available.

While hoping new deliveries would arrive soon, Mr Cua advised tourists and residents to plan ahead and monitor their fuel levels.

“But right now it’s definitely affecting daily life here. If you’re in Bali at the moment, keep an eye on your tank and don’t leave it until empty,” he said.

The Bali Info community page has also cautioned followers about the worsening petrol supply problems.

“Fuel shortages have reportedly hit parts of Bali over the past two days, with long lines of motorbikes seen at petrol stations in Abiansemal, Badung,” the page reported.

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A number of Australian tourists have since used social media to document the queues and describe the impact on their Bali trips.

‘Literally leaving Bali right now, in the airport, the lines go for over a kilometre. At all servos,’ one tourist said.

Another added: ‘Just left this morning, this is real, lines of bikes and cars stretching 500m.’

Bali welcomed 1.63million Australian visitors in 2025, accounting for almost one in four international arrivals to the island. 

Indonesia’s state-owned energy company has scheduled fuel tankers to arrive in Bali every other day this week to replenish petrol and diesel supplies.

Bali Governor Wayan Koster urged everyone not to panic-buy fuel, insisting supplies are sufficient despite the lengthy queues.

He blamed the disruption on traffic congestion delaying deliveries and a surge in motorists attempting to fill up at the same time.

‘For Bali, I can assure you this will not continue. Things should be back to normal within one or two days,’ he told Indonesian news agency ANTARA.

Bali experienced similar fuel supply problems in late August, when motorists were also left waiting in lengthy queues at petrol stations across the island. 

In 2024, Bonnie Lou Gower received a cryptic Instagram message—just seven words carrying the weight of a dark history that stretched back decades.

“I hear we have something in common,” the direct message said.

Although the message came without warning, Gower immediately recognized the sender. It was the woman her former husband had kidnapped and raped 22 years earlier after abducting her from a South Carolina front lawn when she was 15.

Gower’s ex-husband was Richard Marc Evonitz, a serial killer conclusively linked to the murders of three teenage girls in Virginia during the 1990s. Kara Robinson Chamberlain, now 39, was the victim who escaped—and whose account helped police close in on Evonitz before he died by suicide at age 38.

“When I got the message from her, I was kind of floored,” Gower told the Daily Mail. “I wasn’t sure what to do with it, but I thought, ‘She’s pretty brave and is reaching out to me, so I should talk to her and just see where this goes.’”

Gower had previously come across Chamberlain’s social media accounts, where she spoke out for victims and addressed true crime issues. At times, she had even considered contacting her herself.

“But what do you talk about?” Gower, now 55, remembered wondering. “And why would she want to talk to me? I didn’t want to intrude on her life or bring something to her that she didn’t want to deal with.”

Chamberlain, however, felt no resentment toward Gower because of her connection to Evonitz. In fact, she had often thought about the killer’s former wife.

“I very much viewed her as a victim in a way as well—someone who had no idea who this person was that she was married to,” Chamberlain said. “So I viewed her not as anyone who held any culpability, just as someone who was part of this journey.”

Gower responded, and the two quickly formed a connection, speaking by phone for hours. Their first conversation grew into an extraordinary partnership as they began examining other crimes that Evonitz may have committed.

Their investigation is chronicled in the three-part series The Serial Killer Connection, which premiered on Investigation Discovery (ID) on Wednesday evening. The remaining two episodes will air on ID on Wednesdays, with the complete series also available to stream on HBO Max.

For Chamberlain, the project is another step in a lifelong effort to uncover the full truth about the man who abducted her.

“I just feel so very strongly that he was responsible for more than we know… I feel this in my bones,” she said.

Evonitz’s crimes came to public attention in June 2002. On June 24, Chamberlain was watering flowers in the front garden of a friend’s home in Columbia, South Carolina, when 38-year-old Evonitz pulled up. He held a gun to the 15-year-old’s neck and forced her into his vehicle.

He drove her to his apartment, handcuffed her to a bed and sexually assaulted her over 18 hours. Chamberlain eventually found a way to escape: She used her teeth to release the handcuff clasp, freed herself from a leg restraint and quietly slipped out while Evonitz slept.

After flagging down a passing car, Chamberlain was taken to a police station. The details she provided led officers to Evonitz’s home, but he had already fled. Police traced him to Sarasota, Florida, where he died by suicide on June 27 as officers closed in.

Around the same time, there was a knock at the then 30-year-old Gower’s California home.

She had been married to Evonitz from 1988 to 1996 but in the six years that had passed since their separation, she had remarried and had children with her second husband.

Gower was baking a cake with her two young sons when the doorbell rang and FBI agents asked her to sit down.

They told her what happened to Chamberlain, and that her ex-husband was on the run.

‘I was shocked, I could not imagine that he would be capable of hurting anybody,’ she said. ‘It was very surreal, though, a lot of things went through my head.’

And soon there would be more to process. After Evonitz’s suicide, police found notes in his apartment in Richland County, South Carolina, indicating that he was responsible for more crimes. 

Forensic evidence eventually tied him to the kidnapping, sexual assault and murder in Virginia of Sofia Silva, 16, in September 1996, and of sisters Kristin and Kati Lisk, aged 15 and 12, in May 1997.

Silva had been abducted and killed when Gower and Evonitz were still living together.

Looking back today, Gower understands that she was a victim, too. She was 11 years old when she met Evonitz, who was 20 at the time. He was the older brother of a friend, and they started dating when she was 14; they married in August 1988, just a month after she turned 17.

She describes him as ‘charming’ and says she was smitten.

‘I was raised by a single mother and alone a lot, and was very naive [and] extremely trusting,’ she said. ‘Looking back, I was a perfect victim, in the sense that I was easily manipulated. I didn’t even realize I was being manipulated.’

Evonitz was in the Navy so the young couple moved around a lot, first to Portland, Maine, then to San Diego, California, before settling in Spotsylvania County, Virginia.

In The Serial Killer Connection, Gower recounts starting their married life and finding herself in a controlling relationship with Evonitz, who taunted her about her looks and her weight. Although there were red flags, it was not a physically abusive relationship.

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Over the years, Gower found a Polaroid photo of a teenage neighbor sunbathing, a trunk full of pornography and a workout video featuring a teenage girl. She also found Evonitz, who liked to bind her with handcuffs during sex even though it made her uncomfortable, wearing her underwear once.

When she raised concerns about the pornography or expressed unease about the bondage, he was dismissive and implied she was the one at fault.

‘He would always put it back on me that I was the one with the issue, that what he was doing was perfectly normal, that anything that you do within the realms of a married relationship, as long as it’s consensual, is fine,’ she told the Daily Mail.

Nothing, she said, suggested he might be preying on young girls.

But on September 9, 1996, when Gower was in San Diego visiting her brother, 16-year-old Sofia Silva vanished as she drank a soda on her front porch in Spotsylvania. 

Her body was found five weeks later. She had been asphyxiated and signs of sexual assault were present.

Police threw resources at the investigation but had few leads.

Gower remembers coming home from her trip around the time this was all happening. Evonitz was late to pick her up and was ‘kind of disheveled’ and in a bad mood. The shower curtain and a rug were missing from the master bathroom. 

He told her he had slipped, grabbed the shower curtain and fallen on the rug, so he threw them both away.

Gower had no reason not to believe him but their relationship had been deteriorating, and she was worried about Evonitz’s mood swings. Deciding he was not the man she wanted to start a family with, she left later in 1996 and embarked on a new life.

Evonitz went on to kill two more girls – the Lisk sisters – in Spotsylvania the following year.

When Gower found out about her ex-husband’s gruesome double life five years later, she struggled to process the information. She had panic attacks and anxiety but was also busy raising a young family and tried to compartmentalize her feelings.

At a therapist’s suggestion, she started writing down her thoughts. Over the years, these entries turned into a book about her experience living with Evonitz, and in 2024 she decided to look for a publisher. Her son and his wife were both influencers and suggested using social media to draw attention to her situation.

She posted a TikTok video as part of the Put a Finger Down challenge when people tell their stories and see if others can relate. It became a viral sensation and now has nearly 40 million views.

One of those watching was Chamberlain.

In the intervening years, Chamberlain had forged a career in law enforcement, before having a family and focusing her efforts on victim advocacy. She drew on her personal and professional experience in her own podcast and in documentaries about other unsolved crimes.

When people pointed out Gower’s video, Chamberlain was intrigued and quickly got in touch with her unusual message.

‘I was like, “what do you say?” I have a touch of the dark humor and was like, “this is an absurd situation so I’m just going to send a kind of absurd message,”‘ she explained.

It was the conversation starter that she hoped it would be, and Chamberlain explained her drive to find out if Evonitz was responsible for more killings.

While on the run, Evonitz spoke to his sister on the phone and told her he had committed ‘more crimes than he can remember.’ 

But he has only been linked conclusively to the three Spotsylvania murders and Chamberlain’s abduction in South Carolina.

She felt as though Gower could have crucial pieces of the puzzle, and the idea for The Serial Killer Connection was born.

‘It worked really beautifully,’ said Chamberlain, ‘because Bonnie has so much information from that time that tells her story, but also tells his story.’

The Serial Killer Connection weaves Chamberlain and Gower’s narratives into their investigations as they look into unsolved crimes that Evonitz could be responsible for – from Portland to Spotsylvania.

The series includes shocking revelations and witness testimony about Evonitz’s potential links to other high profile unsolved murders in all three of the places he and Gower lived.

Chamberlain hopes that the show will prompt law enforcement agencies to investigate potentially linked cases and get relevant evidence into national databases.

‘My big goal is that we can find out what those cases are and I think that I will be fighting that fight for the rest of my life,’ she said.

And she thinks the unique connection that she and Bonnie share is bringing these cold cases to a wider audience.

‘When have you ever seen a family member of an offender and a victim come together and work together for a united cause? I just don’t think it’s something that’s been done,’ she said.

Women know the scene: you are sitting in a meeting dominated by men, make a suggestion and watch it disappear into the ether. Then, ten minutes later, a man repeats exactly the same idea and suddenly the room fills with nods and approving murmurs. You are left staring in disbelief at the sheer audacity of it.

That is precisely how I feel now. After being patronised for years whenever I argued that Kemi Badenoch was a serious political force and a potential future prime minister, I am now being patronised by people making the same discovery — as though I have not been saying it for months. Grrr.

When Badenoch became Conservative Party leader in 2024, the conventional wisdom was that she would be gone by Christmas. I disagreed. When the verdict shifted to, ‘Perhaps she is not so bad, but it will not last,’ I disagreed again. And while others were enthusiastically backing Nigel Farage and writing off the Conservatives as finished, I still disagreed.

When Robert Jenrick, Danny Kruger and Malcolm Offord moved to Reform and commentators declared that the Conservatives’ cause was lost, I disagreed then, too. Not because I am a political genius or a clairvoyant, but because Badenoch’s qualities have been obvious. She is the real deal.

Now the opinion polls are starting to suggest the same. Following the boost from Kemi Badenoch’s conference speech, the Conservatives have moved ahead of Reform for the first time since the election, reaching 23 per cent — just one point behind Labour on 24.

When I first admitted to being a Kemi Badenoch supporter, I was careful to acknowledge that she was not perfect.

‘Yes, she is prone to gaffes, yes, she can be strong meat and yes, she gets under people’s noses. But when the Conservative Party has been reduced to a directionless, ineffective rump of 119 seats against Labour’s 410, isn’t that precisely what you want?’ I wrote in 2024.

I also argued that Badenoch possessed many of the qualities conspicuously absent from modern politics: authenticity, determination, vision and an unshakeable sense of self that was neither negotiable nor easily changed. The Conservatives needed a leader with courage, confidence and, above all, consistency. She clearly had all three.

Perhaps most importantly, she was the only politician I had seen who appeared unafraid to make difficult arguments. Her position in the debate over transgender issues — including biological sex, women’s safe spaces and self-identification — was a clear example.

She knew what she believed, said so plainly and refused to be bullied or cancelled by her critics. While many politicians seemed willing to appease online mobs and yield to fashionable orthodoxies, Badenoch stood her ground.

In a forest of bending reeds, she appeared to be the one solid oak.

Sometimes a political party has to reach rock bottom before it can begin to recover. That was the position of the Conservatives two years ago, when Badenoch took over. Since then, it is difficult to overstate the extent of the transformation she has brought about.

When she became leader, the internal feuds that had damaged the Conservatives during their years in government were still raging. Robert Jenrick, her rival in the leadership contest, was a notable example, continuing to promote his own ambitions well into Badenoch’s time as leader.

Did that irritate her? I am sure it did. But did she allow it to undermine her? No. She let his vanity run its course. When he eventually defected, she appeared pleased. Reform, she said, was welcome to him.

‘I won’t apologise to those walking away because they don’t like the new direction,’ she said. ‘We only want Conservatives.’

Anyone else, she added, should ‘get out of the way’.

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That uncompromising, ‘my way or the highway’ attitude has been a defining feature of Badenoch’s leadership. At first it came across as abrasive. As new people have joined her team, however, she has softened it to some extent. Even so, a political party cannot be led entirely by committee — and Keir Starmer offered the clearest evidence of that.

There is more to Badenoch than the hard exterior. Beneath it is someone with genuine kindness and a sweetness of character that inspires friendship and loyalty. She has a sharp understanding of human nature, along with an unusual wisdom when handling difficult situations — as her response to the Jenrick episode demonstrated.

This means that while she can be fierce and intense at the despatch box, she can be light-hearted and engaging elsewhere, as the situation requires.

As she has grown into the role, she’s become more skilled at showing this other side of her character, which is why, unlike so many politicians, the more people see of her the more they like her.

It’s not rocket science. Ultimately, there is just something very appealing about a woman who knows her own mind, has a clear sense of purpose and is unafraid to challenge preconceptions.

Her latest policy proposals – removing the financial cliff-edge on childcare, ditching inheritance tax and stamp duty, halving national insurance contributions for workers aged 21-24, reintroducing the two-child benefit cap, scrapping net zero – have the political classes clutching their pearls. But out there in the real world, they make sense.

She still has a way to go. If her assessment is correct, and Andy Burnham does call an early December election, then she will have quite the fight on her hands convincing the electorate to give her party another chance.

But fighting is what she does best. And, so far, she has proved every one of her doubters wrong.

A wicked role for Florence

Along with many others, I’ve been gripped by the new TV adaptation of John Steinbeck’s epic novel, East Of Eden, starring Florence Pugh as the personification of evil, Cathy Ames. She is a wickedly complex character, played brilliantly by Pugh, who showcases her astonishing acting range here. 

At the heart of this story is a woman whose beauty masks a dark and twisted soul, who will stop at nothing to get what she wants. In a world more than ever obsessed with appearance, it’s a stark reminder that beauty is not always a mark of goodness.

Is the dining room going the same way as the dodo? It would seem so. According to new research, almost a quarter of homeowners have turned theirs into something else – a games room, a home office, a yoga studio. This is fine, I suppose, if you have a kitchen big enough for a table, but the idea of doing away with a dining room altogether seems so grim.

Trump’s gone for glamour…again

Donald Trump’s new press secretary is glamorous blonde TV presenter Katie Zacharia, all ‘t**s and teeth’, as my grandmother used to say – and almost indistinguishable from his last appointee to the role, Karoline Leavitt. 

Before that there was Kayleigh McEnany, who served in the role during Trump’s first administration. His foreign policy may be as changeable as the weather, but when it comes to top female aides, never let it be said The Donald isn’t reliably consistent.

There’s having a good relationship with your ex and there’s officiating at their wedding. Just a month after his divorce to Jennifer Meyer, actor Tobey Maguire presided over her nuptials to Geoffrey Ogunlesi, a man taller, younger and richer than him. Judging by the look on Maguire’s face, he couldn’t be happier for them. Either that, or he knows something Mr Ogunlesi doesn’t…

Andy Burnham does love going backwards, doesn’t he? It’s like he’s permanently stuck in reverse. First it’s back to the Seventies, and now he wants to take Britain back to some pre-Brexit utopia that never existed – and certainly doesn’t exist now. Also, someone needs to tell him that when he gets his fake tan done, he mustn’t forget the eyelids. They are beyond the pale. Like his policies.