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LONDON, United Kingdom (AFP) by Katherine Haddon Australian entrepreneur Craig Wright on Monday identified himself as the creator of Bitcoin, following years of speculation about who invented the pioneering digital currency. Wright was identified by three media outlets — the BBC, The Economist and GQ magazine — and posted a blog on the subject on his website. However, in a defiant interview with the BBC, he insisted that he would have preferred his identity to remain secret […]
SYDNEY,Australia (AFP) — An Australian woman working for a charity in Afghanistan has been kidnapped, the country’s foreign minister said Friday. Julie Bishop said Canberra was working to secure the release of Katherine Jane Wilson, but insisted Australia does not pay ransoms for hostages. Wilson, who also uses the first name Kerry, was grabbed in the city of Jalalabad, close to the border with Pakistan, on Thursday, a government official in the area told AFP. […]
SYDNEY , Australia (AFP) — Large parts of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef could be dead within 20 years as climate change drives mass coral bleaching, scientists warned Friday. The World Heritage-listed reef is currently suffering its worst bleaching in recorded history with 93 percent of corals affected due to warming sea temperatures. Experts from the government-backed ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science said in a study that if greenhouse gases keep rising, similar […]
SYDNEY , Australia (AFP) — Australia marked 20 years since its last mass shooting Thursday as campaigners warned its gun laws, which were severely tightened after the massacre, are being eroded. Thirty-five people died at the historic Tasmanian colonial convict site of Port Arthur in 1996 as lone gunman Martin Bryant, armed with semi-automatic weapons, went on the rampage. Now aged 48, he remains in jail after being sentenced to 35 life sentences without parole. […]
SYDNEY,Australia (AFP) — Papua New Guinea on Wednesday said a controversial asylum-seeker camp on Manus island will close, throwing Australia’s border protection policy into disarray. It follows a Supreme Court ruling on Tuesday that detaining people at the Australian-funded facility was unconstitutional and illegal. “Respecting this ruling, Papua New Guinea will immediately ask the Australian government to make alternative arrangements for the asylum-seekers currently held at the Regional Processing Centre,” Prime Minister Peter O’Neill said in […]
https://youtu.be/1YC4u8skQxA SYDNEY, Australia (AFP) — Australia’s Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce on Tuesday mocked Johnny Depp’s acting skills in a video recorded with his wife as an apology for breaking the country’s strict quarantine laws. Joyce, who is also agriculture minister, sparked global headlines last year when he threatened to have the couple’s pet dogs put down unless they “buggered off back to the United States”. The Hollywood star and actress-model Amber Heard on Monday […]
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia (AFP) — Traffic backed up and schools were shut in the Saudi capital Riyadh on Wednesday after the desert city was struck by a rare severe storm that sparked flooding. The storm, which struck during Tuesday evening’s rush hour, had subsided by daybreak Wednesday but some roads were still inundated. Riyadh implemented its emergency plan to deal with the flooding, the spokesman for the municipal council, Mohammed al-Shwayman, was quoted by the official Saudi […]
SUVA, Fiji (AFP) — Fiji was battening down for another tropical cyclone Wednesday, just weeks after the most powerful storm in the Pacific nation’s history left 44 people dead and crippled infrastructure. The Fiji Meteorological Service said Tropical Cyclone Zena formed overnight Tuesday when a depression west of the main island Vita Levu intensified. It said the category two cyclone, with wind gusts of up to 130 kilometres (80 miles) an hour, was gathering strength, […]
Sydney, Australia (AFP)—Two pieces of debris found in Mozambique are “almost certainly from MH370,” Australia and Malaysia said Thursday, after technical analysis provided fresh clues to the fate of the missing Malaysia Airlines (MAS) aircraft. Until the latest discoveries, only a wing part recovered from a beach on the Indian Ocean island of La Reunion, which lies east of Mozambique, had been confirmed as coming from the plane that disappeared two years ago. “The analysis […]
REUTERS — An Australian Navy ship seized a huge cache of weapons near Oman’s coast from a fishing vessel bound for Somalia, the navy said on Monday (March 7), exposing a possible violation of a U.N. Security Council arms embargo. The United Nations has a decades-long arms embargo in place against Somalia, which has been mired in conflict since civil war broke out in 1991. The Australian navy, which patrols waters around the Indian Ocean […]
by Martin Parry SYDNEY, Australia (AFP) — Vatican finance chief Cardinal George Pell admitted Monday the Catholic Church “mucked up” in dealing with paedophile priests and vowed he would not “defend the indefensible” before an Australian inquiry. Pell gave evidence from a hotel in Rome via video-link to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in Sydney rather than appear in person as he has a heart condition. The inquiry is currently […]
SUVA, Fiji (AFP) — Humanitarian aid was finally reaching isolated communities in Fiji devastated by super-cyclone Winston, officials said Friday, with the government estimating the damage bill will top hundreds of millions of dollars. At least 44 people died when the most powerful storm in Fiji’s history hit on Saturday and the UN says about 50,000 — more than five percent of the entire population — have been left homeless. Some of the worst-affected villages were on […]
