Australian Identical Twins Share Everything from Boyfriend to Plastic Surgeries

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Australian Identical Twins Share Everything from Boyfriend to Plastic Surgeries

Jullian Assange Interview | Julian Assange Confident of Australian Senate Seat

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Jullian Assange Interview | Julian Assange Confident of Australian Senate Seat

Stanislas Wawrinka beats an ailing Rafael Nadal to claim Australian Open title

Stanislas Wawrinka savors the moment of victory in Melbourne after beating world no. 1 Rafael Nadal.

• Stanislas Wawrinka wins Australian Open men’s singles title against ailing Rafael Nadal


• Swiss claims first grand slam title in four sets 6-3 6-2 3-6 6-3 at Rod Laver Arena, Melbourne

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Melbourne, Australia (CNN) — Stanislas Wawrinka won his first grand slam tennis title when he beat an ailing Rafael Nadal in Sunday’s Australian Open final.

Wawrinka defeated the world No. 1 6-3 6-2 3-6 6-3 in Melbourne to join his good friend Roger Federer as a Swiss grand slam champion.

Wawrinka had never even taken a set off the world No. 1 in 12 previous matches but when an emotional Nadal took a medical timeout for a back injury in the second set, the odds swung in his favor.

Nadal, who downed Federer in the semifinals, was seeking to join Pete Sampras on 14 majors. That would have placed him three behind Federer, the men’s all-time leader.

more to follow …

CNN.com Recently Published/Updated

Stanislas Wawrinka beats an ailing Rafael Nadal to claim Australian Open title

Australian Police State Approaches, Max Igan & Vinny Eastwood 8Feb2013

Economy and boat people key issues in Australian poll

Tony Abbott (left) and Kevin Rudd are due to face off in election scheduled for September 7

• Australians will go to the polls on September 7


• Border protection and the economy set to be key issues


• Both parties likely to agree on education and national broadband policy


• The media to play a strong role in what has proved to be a fickle electorate

(CNN) — Australians go to the polls in less than five weeks to vote in elections that will decide on policies as diverse as how the country polices its borders, how it manages its greenhouse emissions and how it plans to roll out a national scheme to connect every part of the vast continent to the Internet.

Just weeks after ousting rival Julia Gillard, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd on the weekend called a national election for September 7, rallying the Australian Labor Party faithful to stand behind the party’s policies on education and the economy.

“We’ve got one hell of a fight on our hands,” Rudd said in an email to supporters.

“I have a positive vision about the country we can be. In this election I’ll be talking with Australians across the county about better schools for our kids, investing so we can create good jobs, and about how the NBN (national broadband network) can help keep our economy strong.”

So what’s at stake:

1.The asylum-seeker issue

No area of policy is likely to be more contested, however, than border protection.

Australia debates asylum policy

An emotive issue that for decades has been fodder for Australia’s strident brand of talk-back radio show hosts, known colloquially as ‘shock-jocks’, both the opposition Liberal-National Coalition under Tony Abbott and Rudd have policies that would effectively curtail the influx of ‘boat people’ to Australia.

According to Australia’s Department of Immigration, this year 218 boats carrying 15,182 passengers were listed as irregular maritime arrivals as of July, 2013 — most of them refugees from Iraq, Iran, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and Bangladesh seeking asylum.

Rudd has put forward the Papua New Guinea plan to deal with the influx, a $ A1.1 billion scheme that would settle asylum seekers outside Australia permanently. Abbott, meanwhile, says he will turn the problem over to Australia’s military which would be under orders to tow asylum-seeker boats to Indonesia.

Indonesia, however, has remained opposed to the opposition’s scheme.

Why Australia’s PNG asylum plan won’t work

2.Tax and spending

Both parties, meanwhile, plan to axe the country’s controversial carbon tax on greenhouse emissions. Uncertainty over the issue was credited with unseating Rudd’s first government and both parties have adopted fresh policies.

We’ve got one hell of a fight on our hands
Kevin Rudd

Under Rudd, the government would move one year early to an emissions trading scheme while the Liberal Party plans to scrap carbon trading altogether in favor of a voluntary emissions reduction scheme it has called ‘direct action.’

On the broader economic front, the government is likely to point to Australia’s stellar economic figures which this year pegged growth at 2.5%, a jobless rate of 5.7%, inflation at just 2.4% and interest rates also at a low 2.75%.

While Australia has seen a sustained boom, largely thanks to the sale of commodities to a resource-hungry China, the government has racked up a deficit of $ A30 billion and Abbott — a fiscal conservative – is certain to target government-spending in the lead-up to the election.

How the Australian political rivals view China

3.The Internet

The National Broadband Network (NBN), a contentious $ 40 billion program to connect more than 90 per cent of Australia’s premises with super fast fiber optic cables, would be scaled back under a Liberal-National Coalition government, which favors the use of existing, but slower, copper cable networks fed by fiber optic cables to the node.

The NBN has proved highly popular in regions where the network has already been rolled out and some analysts say a perceived reversal of the policy could damage the Coalition’s chances at the polls.

With little differentiating the parties substantively on policy, the role of the media in the lead-up to the elections will be crucial to the fortunes of both parties. Already the right-leaning Daily Telegraph newspaper — Sydney’s largest-selling tabloid — has called on readers to vote for the Coalition running the headline: “Kick This Mob Out”.

“The mass media no longer sees the explanations of policies and ideas as a central part of its charter,” analyst Shaun Carney of Monash University told The Conversation website. “As it finds itself having to chase eyeballs in order to keep its financial head above water, it becomes more sensational, more attracted to portraying conflict and dealing with what public figures say rather than what they believe or do.

“The parties go along with this model by ramping up the hyperbole.”

CNN.com Recently Published/Updated

Economy and boat people key issues in Australian poll

Australian Premier Calls Election for September 7

CANBERRA — Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd called a September 7 general election on Sunday, barely six weeks after he toppled former leader Julia Gillard in a party-room vote, ending a turbulent three years in power for the minority Labor government.

Rudd, who was dumped by his center-left party in June 2010, has generated a spike in public support since he returned but conservative opposition leader Tony Abbott is still favorite to win power.

Rudd’s Labor government could fall with the loss of just one of the 150 seats in parliament. His government currently holds 71 seats, the opposition 72, with one Green and six independent cross benchers.

Abbott’s opposition has promised to scrap an unpopular 30 percent tax on coal and iron ore mine profits, as well as a A$ 24.15/metric ton (1.1023 tons) carbon tax, if he wins power.

Rudd returned as prime minister on June 26 after he toppled Gillard, with a third of Gillard’s cabinet also stepping down.

His party has been in power since late 2007 and helped Australia’s A$ 1.4 trillion economy avoid recession following the 2008 global financial crisis, aided by a prolonged mining boom fuelled by resources demand from China and India.

However, a budget update on Friday showed Australia’s economic growth is slowing as the mining investment boom ends, with unemployment rising and the manufacturing sector in particular shedding jobs.

AMP Capital Investors chief economist Shane Oliver said the election campaign could usher in a quieter period in the economy because Australians usually restrain spending during elections.

“It would be good for confidence to see an end to minority government and to get the election out of the way,” Oliver said, adding a victory for the pro-business opposition parties could also boost business confidence.

HELL OF A FIGHT”

Rudd announced the election date in an email to his supporters, telling them “it’s on”, after visiting Governor-General Quentin Bryce, who is Australia’ head of state, to dissolve the current parliament.

“We’ve got one hell of a fight on our hands,” Rudd said.

The latest polls show Rudd has lifted Labor’s support to give the government a chance of victory, although the respected Newspoll in late July still had Rudd’s Labor Party trailing the opposition by four percentage points, 48 percent to 52 percent.

Analyst Nick Economou said polls have not swung back to Rudd enough to put Labor in a winning position, particularly in marginal seats in the outer suburbs of Australia’s major cities.

“Rudd has undertaken a risky strategy. The polls indicate that Labor has achieved the recovery of previously strong Labor voters. But I’m not sure that Labor’s message is resonating in key marginal seats,” Monash University’s Economou told Reuters.

“I can’t see that he can win.”

Online bookmaker Sportsbet.com, which takes bets in each of the 150 electorates, said current projections had Rudd winning 65 seats and Abbott’s conservatives 82.

Gillard introduced the price on carbon and the mining tax, and strengthened Australia’s defense ties with the United States, although her government was hamstrung by a lack of a parliamentary majority and party infighting.

Abbott has built a strong lead in opinion polls with his campaign to abolish the carbon tax, which he has blamed for pushing up electricity prices and for job losses.

He has also won support for his strong stance against asylum seekers who arrive in Australia by boat, with refugee policy set to play a leading role in the election.

Since returning to office, Rudd has announced Australia’s toughest measures to deter asylum seekers, announcing anyone who arrives by boat will be sent to either Papua New Guinea or Nauru in the Pacific for processing and resettlement.

The election date means Rudd will miss the G20 summit in St Petersburg on September 5-6, even though Australia will take over as chair of the G20 for the coming year.

(Editing by Paul Tait)

NYT > Global Home

Australian Premier Calls Election for September 7

Jellyfish sting ends Australian woman"s record swim from Cuba to U.S.

1 of 6. Australian long-distance swimmer Chloe McCardel starts her attempt to swim to Florida from Havana June 12, 2013.

Credit: Reuters/Desmond Boylan

Reuters: Lifestyle

Jellyfish sting ends Australian woman"s record swim from Cuba to U.S.

Coins could rewrite Australian history

A find of 1000-year-old coins (not pictured) had led archaeologists to launch an expedition that may rewrite Australian history. Source: news.com.au

• Expedition to uncover history of found coins


• Coins not of monetary value, priceless to archaeologists


• Triangular coin to mark Canberra’s birthday

FIVE copper coins and a nearly 70-year-old map with an “X” might lead to a discovery that could rewrite Australia’s history.

Australian scientist Ian McIntosh, currently Professor of Anthropology at Indiana University in the US, plans an expedition in July that has stirred up the archaeological community.

The scientist wants to revisit the location where five coins were found in the Northern Territory in 1944 that have proven to be 1000 years old, opening up the possibility that seafarers from distant countries might have landed in Australia much earlier than what is currently believed.

Back in 1944 during World War II, after Japanese bombers had attacked Darwin two years earlier, the Wessel Islands – an uninhabited group of islands off Australia’s north coast – had become a strategic position to help protect the mainland.

Australian soldier Maurie Isenberg was stationed on one of the islands to man a radar station and spent his spare time fishing on the idyllic beaches.

While sitting in the sand with his fishing-rod, he discovered a handful of coins in the sand.

He didn’t have a clue where they could come from but pocketed them anyway and later placed them in a tin.

In 1979 he rediscovered his “treasure” and decided to send the coins to a museum to get them identified.

The coins proved to be 1000 years old.

Still not fully realising what treasure he held in his hands, he marked an old colleague’s map with an “X” to remember where he had found them.

The discovery was apparently forgotten again until anthropologist McIntosh got the ball rolling a few months ago.

The coins raise many important questions:

How did 1000-year-old coins end up on a remote beach on an island off the northern coast of Australia?

Did explorers from distant lands arrive on Australian shores way before the James Cook declared it “terra nullius” and claimed it for the British throne in 1770?

We do know already that Captain Cook wasn’t the first white seafarer to step on Australia’s shores.

In 1606 a Dutch explorer named Willem Janszoon reached the Cape York peninsula in Queensland, closely followed a few years late by another Dutch seafarer Dirk Hartog.

And the Spaniard Luiz Vaez de Torres discovered the strait between Papua New Guinea and Australia, which was later named Torres Strait in his honour.

However, none of these explorers recognised that they had discovered the famed southern continent, the “terra australis incognita”, which was depicted as a counterweight to the known land masses of the northern hemisphere on many world maps of the day.

McIntosh and his team of Australian and American historians, archaeologists, geomorphologists and Aboriginal rangers say that the five coins date back to the 900s to 1300s.

They are African coins from the former Kilwa sultanate, now a World Heritage ruin on an island off Tanzania.

Kilwa once was a flourishing trade port with links to India in the 13th to 16th century.

The trade with gold, silver, pearls, perfumes, Arabian stone ware, Persian ceramics and Chinese porcelain made the city one of the most influential towns in East Africa at the time.

The copper coins were the first coins ever produced in sub-Saharan Africa and according to McIntosh have only twice been found outside Africa: once in Oman and Isenberg’s find in 1944.

The old coins might not be of monetary value, but for archaeologists they are priceless, says McIntosh.

Archaeologists have long suspected that there may have been early maritime trading routes that linked East Africa, Arabia, India and the Spice Islands even 1,000 years ago.

Or the coins could’ve washed ashore after a shipwreck.

When Isenberg discovered the copper coins he also found four coins that originated from the Dutch East India Company – with one dating back to 1690 raising memories of those early Dutch seafarers that stepped on Australian shores well before Cook.

McIntosh wants to answer some of these mysteries during his planned expedition to the Wessel Islands in July.

And it’s not only about revisiting the beach that was marked with an “X” on Isenberg’s map.

He will also be looking for a secret cave Aboriginal legends talk about.

This cave is supposed to be close to the beach where Isenberg once found the coins and is said to be filled with doubloons and weaponry of an ancient era.

Should McIntosh and his team find what they are looking for, the find might not only be priceless treasure, but relics that could rewrite Australian history.

NEWS.com.au | Technology News

Coins could rewrite Australian history