Australia News

Biofuels have caused world food prices to increase by 75 percent, according to the findings of an unpublished World Bank report published in The Guardian newspaper on Friday.

Some have claimed that, all else being equal, climate change will increase the frequency or severity of weather-related extreme events (see, e.g., IPCC 2001; Patz 2004; MacMichael and Woodruff 2004). This study examines whether losses due to such events (as measured by aggregate deaths and death rates2) have increased globally and for the United States in recent decades. It will also attempt to put these deaths and death rates into perspective by comparing them with the overall mortality burden, and briefly discuss what trends in these measures imply about human adaptive capacity.

Rejecting predictions that the Great Barrier Reef would be destroyed and rainfall patterns radically altered without immediate moves to cut carbon emissions, climatologist Stewart Franks said scenarios set out by Ross Garnaut were simply wrong. "The whole idea that you can say that by 2030 or 2040 rainfall will be a certain percentage less is a complete nonsense because it ignores the natural variability," he said.

THE Rudd Government will ask the Australia Council to develop a set of protocols to cover the representation of children in art, after a taxpayer-funded magazine put a picture of a nude six-year-old girl on its cover.

Queensland Police are interviewing two teenage boys regarding the death of a 53 year old man in Brisbane's West End.

The man suffered major injuries during an altercation with an unknown number of offenders and died at the scene at 6pm (AEST) yesterday.

Police are treating the death as murder and said two boys, aged 17 and 14, were assisting with their inquiries.

A man is due to face a Sydney court this morning, charged with the murder of his former wife, Queensland woman Lisa Keem. The badly burnt body of Ms Keem was found last month in state forest near Kempsey on the NSW mid-north coast.

Richard Giardina, 39, was arrested yesterday afternoon at Sydney International Airport after returning on a flight from London.

Tens of thousands of people crowded into Pamplona's main square Sunday to celebrate the launching of a rocket that each year marks the beginning of Spain's most famous bull-running festival.

'Men and women of Pamplona, all hail to San Fermin,' town councilor Uxe Barkos said from a balcony overlooking the crowd before lighting the fuse, signaling the beginning of nine days of uninterrupted festivities in the northern town.

The San Fermin festival is known around the world for its running of the bulls. The mood and tradition was made famous in 1926 by Ernest Hemingway in his novel 'The Sun Also Rises.'

POLICE have revealed the name of the man, missing in the Tweed River since yesterday, when his son, 5, was plucked from the river and revived.

Lisa Keem's badly burnt body was found in bushland in northern NSW. Map: Sydney Airport 2020 Detectives in New South Wales have arrested the ex-husband of Hervey Bay woman Lisa Keem, whose body was found in ...

SYDNEY, Australia -- "Crocodile Dundee" star Paul Hogan hallenged Australian tax authorities Friday to track him down in the United States after a newspaper report that he was under investigation for tax ...

Long-term reform: Mr Rudd has described today's meeting as highly productive. The Federal Government will put $3.7 billion into projects to save the Murray-Darling Basin as part of a formalised agreement made ...

How much carbon dioxide does it take to grow the wheat required to produce a loaf of bread? Or–How much carbon dioxide does it take to grow the corn for the chicken feed required to produce a dozen eggs? Far from being a pollutant, man along with every animal on land, fish in the sea, and bird in the air is totally dependent on atmospheric carbon dioxide for his food supply.

On the day the alarmist Garnaut report on global warming makes headlines in the media in Australia Sydney shivered through a very cold day in some suburbs only getting up to around 13 degrees celcius. Nature however must have a good sense of humour as it keeps giving us these cold spells at the same time the scare brigade trots out their "sky is falling' mantra. Yet there was another funny coincidence today - as the afternoon wore on and the light started to disappear the 'official' BOM temperature record at Observatory Hill (the government weather station) started to rise - going from 13d c at 3.30 to 14.5 degrees c at 5.30. Yet across most of the rest of Sydney temperatures at the same time fell by about 1.5 degrees. What most people dont realise is most of what we are presented in climate data is NOT raw figures but 'smoothed' or adjusted figures. One wonders whether the global warming brigade at the Bureau of Meteorology found todays cold snap a little er shall we say - inconvenient for the Garnaut report.

Seems like the alarmists have been in bed with the media again and as usual the scare campaigns have little to do with truth or reality. twawki

Reminiscent of religion in the middle ages the coming visit of the pope - that man who claims to be the interpretor between God and humanity - has been 'blessed' by NSW Labor politicians who have brought in draconian laws that strip the average citizen of civil rights and liberties. In a contravention of the separation of church and state it would seem that these new powers being introduced by our "look what we say, not what we do' group of 'christian' labor leaders could simply be - illegal. As Chapter V, 116 of the constitution states "the states shall not make any law for establishing any religion". As a suggestion to our state leaders better to clean up the own mess youve made (pedophilia, abuse, rorting etc) rather than pretending to be holier than thou whilst denying the average citizen basic civil rights and liberties.

NOTORIOUS pedophile Dennis Raymond Ferguson has been spirited out of Miles after a group of 80 people had gathered at a property at which he was staying.

Aboriginal tracker Pannican was honoured y for his outstanding service to the WA community - ' more than 40 years after his death.

Oombulgurri a remote Aboriginal township could be considered a "failed" community and the West Australian Government has been advised to investigate whether the community is viable.

Victorian Premier John Brumby has sworn to sabotage a Rudd government plan to accelerate the Murray-Darling rescue. The Murray Darling River system faces collapse after one of the driest Autumns on record.

Academic Elizabeth Grant is travelling overseas to examine other nations attempts to develop culturally appropriate prisons in an effort to reduce deaths in custody.