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/ 4 November 2004
Recipes for kangaroo testicles won’t be knocked until they’re tried next year at the World Testicle Cooking Championships in Serbia, news reports said on Thursday. The annual event is organised by the Serbian Tourism Board, and an invitation has gone out to Australian chefs to come to Belgrade next year.
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/ 29 October 2004
Parrots in Sydney’s Royal Botanical Gardens are getting drunk on tree nectar that has fermented in the spring sunshine, it was reported on Friday. The Sydney Morning Herald said rainbow lorikeets in the central Sydney reserve were staggering around tipsy after eating nectar from the Schotia brachypetala tree.
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/ 21 October 2004
Residents of Sydney’s beachside suburbs, some of the most expensive real estate in Australia, have traditionally woken to the sounds of lapping waves or the muted yelps of small dogs on their morning walks. But recently their mornings have been shattered by khaki-clad fitness instructors barking orders to boot camp-style classes.
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/ 14 October 2004
A respectable, middle-aged woman with a steady partner would leave the house while sleepwalking and have random sex with strangers, an Australian doctor said in a report on Thursday. Peter Buchanan, who treated the woman, said this was an example of a recently identified disorder known as sleep sex.
A British entrepreneur has proposed turning a Sydney house where a Filipino-Australian slaughtered his family into a gruesome museum commemorating one of the city’s grisliest crimes. The neat brick home in the affluent suburb of Epping has been dubbed Australia’s house of horrors after student Sef Gonzales (24) killed his father, mother and teenage sister in 2001.
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/ 30 September 2004
When mutineers from HMS Bounty were looking for a place to hide in the Pacific in the late 1700s, their leader, Fletcher Christian, exploited some sloppy map making to set up home on an island they knew was in the wrong place on British Admiralty charts. It was an inspired choice that led to the establishment of one of the world’s most isolated communities.
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/ 18 September 2004
Police discovered scores of reptiles, including deadly snakes and three crocodiles, in a suburban Sydney home, officials said on Saturday. David O’Shannessy of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals said his staff found three baby crocodiles as well as snakes among more than 100 animals in the house.
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/ 15 September 2004
Australia has taken action to prevent an Irish-owned ”super trawler” from plundering fish stocks around the country’s southeast coast, officials said on Thursday. Fishermen and conservationists had warned that allowing the 106-metre Veronica into Australian waters would devastate populations of small pelagic fish.
Packs of wild dogs on Australia’s Fraser Island have merged into one ”superpack” that poses a big risk to the thousands of local and foreign tourists who flock to camping sites their each year, a researcher said on Monday. The Fraser Island dingoes have developed a tolerance for each other that is uncharacteristic of their breed.
Anglo-Australian mining giant BHP Billiton said on Thursday it was forming a joint venture with Japanese steelmaker JFE steel that will underpin iron ore sales worth ,7-billion over the next 11 years. The joint venture partners will work together to develop and commercialise part of BHP Billiton’s Yandi mine in northwestern Australia.
A former Anglican bishop who seduced a schoolgirl 50 years ago on Wednesday became the first churchman in Australia ever to be defrocked. Donald Shearman (77) had sex with the girl regularly when he was a boarding house master and she a boarder in his care between 1954 and 1956.
Australian scientists are using the collective intelligence found in insect swarms to develop the next generation of hi-tech military hardware. The goal is to develop swarms of small, expendable unmanned vehicles that can carry out missions in ground, sea and aerial environments too dangerous for humans.
Threatened native fish species in Australia’s largest river were on Monday given ”ladders” to by-pass obstacles put in their way by man, the government announced on Monday. The so-called ”fish ladders” are passages that will allow the fish to swim past weirs in the Murray river, Australia’s largest, in the hope of reversing a catastrophic decline in their numbers.
An Australian grandmother — sick of having her knickers peek over the top of the latest low-cut trousers — has designed a pair of backless briefs she predicted on Monday will take the market by storm. ”You’ll never have to pull your knickers out again,” 44-year-old Jan Digney said of her revolutionary design which rides neither up nor down buttock cheeks.
Forget waiting for ET to call — the most likely place to find an alien message is in our DNA, according to an expert in Australia. Professor Paul Davies, from the Australian Centre for Astrobiology at Macquarie University in Sydney, believes a cosmic greeting card could have been left in every human cell.
A bomb threat that forced a United Airlines 747 jet to make an emergency return to Sydney International airport was a hoax, police said late on Tuesday. Police superintendent Peter O’Brien said passengers and crew aboard the flight had been cleared of writing the hoax note, which triggered a full-scale security alert.
<li><a class=’standardtextsmall’ href="http://www.mg.co.za/Content/pd.asp?ao=119367">Bomb note grounds Aussie flight</a>
A United Airlines flight from Australia to Los Angeles returned to Sydney International airport late on Tuesday afternoon after staff on board found a note carrying a bomb threat, Australia’s transport minister said. Roads leading to the airport also reportedly were closed off during the emergency.
Two Pacific island countries have become the global centre of the Internet porn industry, according to a report. The report, by United States-based consultants Secure Computing, said Niue and Tonga provide addresses for almost as many pornographic web pages as the whole of Asia and Latin America. It alleges that Niue hosts 2,9-million pornographic pages.
An elderly Australian on Sunday backed up Lindy Chamberlain’s claim that a dingo took her baby when she was camping 24 years ago at what was then called Ayers Rock. Frank Cole (78) told the Herald Sun newspaper that he shot the dingo that took Azaria and that it still had the infant’s body in its mouth when it died.
Only marriages between men and women will be recognised in Australia under draft legislation that has the support of both the ruling Liberal-National coalition and the opposition Labour Party. The draft legislation mirrors that proposed by United States President George Bush.
An Australian television channel is being taken to court for allowing ”Jesus Christ!” to be used as an oath in a British crime series it broadcasts, news reports said on Thursday. Pensioner Andre van der Linden has lodged his complaint against Channel Seven with the Civil and Administrative Tribunal claiming a breach of racial and religious vilification laws.
Derbies between the ACT Brumbies and NSW Waratahs are often emotional affairs but Saturday’s Super 12 all-Aussie showdown has taken on extra niggle with verbal sparring this week. The Brumbies take special delight in putting one over big brother and their clash at the Sydney Football Stadium has all the signs of a sparky encounter.
A Sydney woman is taking legal action against a local hospital after a pair of surgical scissors were left in her abdomen for 18 months following an operation. Pat Skinner (69) told national radio that doctors had given her a clean bill of health after part of her colon was removed at Sydney’s St George Hospital three years ago.
The government of the Pacific country of Vanuatu is to appeal to Britain and France for compensation for 19th century ”slave voyages” which saw 62 000 Melanesians uprooted to work in the sugarcane fields of Queensland and Fiji. Thousands of Pacific islanders were kidnapped or tricked by European and South American traders in the late 19th century.
An Australian court has allowed a 13-year-old girl to have sex-change treatment in a decision that has set the country’s medical and psychiatric professions at odds. The child, who was named as Alex in court documents, wants to take reversible hormone treatment to prevent menstruation before she starts at secondary school. She will not go ahead with sex-change surgery until she is 18.
Astronomers using the Anglo-Australian telescope in outback Australia announced on Thursday the discovery of more than 40 previously unknown ”dwarf” galaxies in a constellation ”on Earth’s doorstep”. The team of 12 scientists from five countries found the objects hidden in the nearby Fornax cluster of galaxies.
A shower of rain won’t put a damper on Sydney’s back-out-of-the-closet annual gay and lesbian Mardi Gras parade. Neither will it scupper an attempt at a world record for the most people in one place dancing to the Village People’s disco classic <i>YMCA</i>, chief organiser Michael Woodhouse said on Saturday.
<li><a class=’standardtextsmall’ href="http://www.mg.co.za/Content/l3.asp?ao=32294">Gay ‘culture wars’ gather pace</a>
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/ 10 February 2004
International music provider Kazaa asked the Australian Federal Court on Tuesday to delay hearing alleged copyright breaches against it until a similar case in the United States is finished. The hearing follows raids last week by five record labels on a dozen sites across the country to collect evidence against Kazaa, the world’s largest file sharing network.
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/ 18 January 2004
Thousands of people had to be evacuated from parts of Australia’s eastern states of New South Wales and Queensland at the weekend after days of torrential rain turned drought into floods, officials said on Sunday. The New South Wales state government on Sunday declared three districts natural disaster zones.
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/ 15 January 2004
The Aboriginal woman whose life inspired the acclaimed film Rabbit Proof Fence about the so-called ”stolen generations” of indigenous Australians has died at the age of 87. Molly Kelly died in her sleep on Tuesday in the Western Australia town of Jigalong.
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/ 31 October 2003
An eight-year-old Iranian refugee whose plight ignited a bitter immigration row in Australia launched a civil suit this week against the government, claiming that he suffered severe mental health problems caused by his time in detention.
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/ 29 October 2003
Australia’s worst serial killers were sentenced on Wednesday to life in prison for their role in what became known as the bodies-in-the-barrels case. ”The evidence has drawn me to the conclusion that both of you are incapable of true rehabilitation,” Judge Brian Martin told John Bunting (37) and Robert Wagner (31).