News stories by Stephen de Tarczynski, page 4

Kelly Johnson was just 28 when she was murdered by a former boyfriend at her Adelaide home last year. The mother of one was hit on the head with a frying pan and stabbed repeatedly with 'startling ferocity', according to Justice Trish Kelly, who handed down a mandatory life sentence to Johnson's killer, Daniel Hall, in February.

Scientists have been surprised by the rapid recovery of coral reefs from mass bleaching on Australia's iconic Great Barrier Reef, but they warn that reefs remain particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change.

Australia’s opposition and governing parties have been admonished for attempting to make ‘political capital’ out of the recent spike in asylum seekers trying to reach the nation’s shores by boat.

The fires which swept across 400,000 hectares of bush in the south-eastern Australian state of Victoria in February left 173 people dead and ruined more than two thousand homes. But while they razed businesses, schools and kindergartens to the ground, wildlife and their habitats were also destroyed.

Despite ongoing community concerns over the highly secretive Pine Gap spy station in central Australia, the nation’s parliament has moved to effectively ban protest at the joint Australia-United States base.

The U.K. government’s recent announcement that it will conduct an inquiry into Britain’s involvement in Iraq has led to calls here for Australia to review its own participation in the controversial war.

The revelation that a substantial amount of contaminated water is leaking each day from a tailings dam at a uranium mine, located in a World Heritage Site, has sparked protests from environment activists.

A yet-to-be released report by Australia’s human rights watchdog into the 2005 treatment of a group of Chinese asylum seekers held at the immigration detention here has concluded that serious breaches of civil and political rights were made by the immigration department.

Civil libertarians are concerned that significant powers wielded by authorities in order to conduct investigations into terrorism-related activities are being normalised and made available for less serious crimes.

With the internecine battle among some of the 42 contributing nations to the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) over burden-sharing in Afghanistan continuing, the Australian government is giving little away about its intentions regarding an expected request for more troops.