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Australia’s opposition leader conceded defeat on Sunday in a chaotic national election that has left Australia in a state of political paralysis for more than a week, while officials scramble to sort out who, if anyone, actually won the tight race. Vote counting was still underway from the July 2 ballot, but opposition leader Bill Shorten said Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s ruling conservative coalition would eventually secure enough seats in the 150-seat House of Representatives to retain power. […] With Shorten’s center-left Labor Party out of the running, just two options remain: Either the coalition will form a majority government...

THE Grand Mufti of Australia has just proved that Pauline Hanson is right to feel threatened by Islam in this country. Ibrahim Abu Mohammad has written an astonishing letter warning that to criticise even a gay-hating imam is to risk inciting terrorist attacks against us. His inflammatory letter perfectly demonstrates why Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull was a fool to hold an Iftar dinner for the Mufti and other troubling Muslim leaders during the election campaign. And Turnbull’s dinner — shown on all TV news bulletins — may explain why Hanson’s vote on Saturday was so high, helping her to win...

Matt Damon praised Australia’s gun laws while promoting his latest gun-toting Jason Bourne film in that country. “You guys did it here in one fell swoop, and I wish that could happen in my country, but it’s such a personal issue for people that we cannot talk about it sensibly,” the diminutive star said while pandering his way through the former British prison colony. (VIDEO-AT-LINK) “Obviously, mass shootings aren’t going to do it. There have been so many of them at this point. Sandy Hook — when those children were murdered — if that didn’t do it, you know, I...

Gun-toting action star Matt Damon of The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy, The Bourne Ultimatum, and The Departed, says he wishes the U.S. would implement a gun ban similar to the one Australia implemented in the 1990s. Appearing in Sydney, Australia, for his latest gun-toting action film, Jason Bourne, Damon praised Australia’s gun ban and said he wishes the U.S. would follow the Aussies’ lead. According to Stuff, Damon said, “You guys did it here in one fell swoop and I wish that could happen in my country, but it’s such a personal issue for people that we cannot talk...

Explanation: South of Antares, in the tail of the nebula-rich constellation Scorpius, lies emission nebula IC 4628. Nearby hot, massive stars, millions of years young, radiate the nebula with invisible ultraviolet light, stripping electrons from atoms. The electrons eventually recombine with the atoms to produce the visible nebular glow, dominated by the red emission of hydrogen. At an estimated distance of 6,000 light-years, the region shown is about 250 light-years across, spanning an area equivalent to four full moons on the sky. The nebula is also cataloged as Gum 56 for Australian astronomer Colin Stanley Gum, but seafood-loving astronomers might...

An Australian TV station has released a shocking report showing its crew being attacked by masked men in a Stockholm suburb known as ‘Little Mogadishu’ due to its primarily Somali population. Since the report was filmed last month, Swedish police have dropped all charges, despite the migrants throwing missile and punches, fly kicking the journalist, and even running one over with a car. The Channel Nine crew and high-profile Australian news correspondent, Liz Hayes, had traveled to the Swedish capital to investigate how the migrant “overload” has affected Swedish society. Upon entering a migrant area, Rinkeby, they were quick to...

A Proposed free mobility labour zone between Australia, New Zealand, the UK and Canada has strong support, according to a poll. A survey commissioned by the Royal Commonwealth Society in London found that 70 per cent of Australians, 82 per cent of Kiwis, 58 per cent of Brits and 75 per cent of Canadians are in support of reciprocal open borders between [these UK] nations when it comes to living and working in them. If the UK exits the EU, it would no longer be bound by the EU’s free labour movement laws. end of except, i added in brackets...

TONY Abbott must return as leader of the shattered Liberals after Saturday’s election disaster. ..... True, Abbott ideally needs months more to repair the image that a smart-arse media tore to shreds, feeding off his sometimes dumb mistakes. But who else but Abbott could hope to fix what Turnbull has just smashed? This election result has been a near-total catastrophe for the Liberals, who have been left without a mandate, platform, unity, honour or real power after letting Turnbull hijack their party last year. Turnbull, a man of the ABC Left, then ditched the Liberals’ base, Liberal principles and even...

Not Out of Africa but regional continuityA challenging idea about Human Evolution by Alan Thorne Mungo Lady Mungo Lady was delivered to Alan Thorne in a small cheap suitcase in 1968 when he was 28 years old. Her burned and shattered bones were embedded in six blocks of calcified sand. The field researchers who dug her up in a parched no-man's-land in southeastern Australia suspected that shewas tens of thousands of years old. 600 Bone Chips Almost every day for the next six months, he painstakingly freed her remains from the sand with a dental drill, prizing out more than...

Tuesday, 18 February, 2003, 16:57 GMT Date for first Australians The Mungo burials have cast doubt on "Out of Africa" A new analysis of Australia's oldest human remains suggests humans arrived on the continent about 50,000 years ago. The evidence is based on a re-examination of the so-called Mungo Man skeleton, unearthed in New South Wales (NSW) in 1974. Scientists say the individual was probably buried about 40,000 years ago, when humans had been living in the area for some 10,000 years. We find no evidence to support claims for human occupation or burials near 60 kyr ago James Bowler...

January 8, 2002 Genes Help Identify Oldest Human Population By NICHOLAS WADE Peering deep into the archive of population history that is stored in the human genome, a Stanford University biologist believes he has picked up a genetic signature of the ancestral human population. The signature, a pattern of genetic changes on the male or Y chromosome, is apparent in some present- day Ethiopians and in the Khoisan, click language speakers who now live in South Africa. The researcher, Dr. Peter A. Underhill of Stanford University, believes these people may include descendants of the ancestral human population that occupied the ...

On a rugged island just offshore from Ventura County, archaeologists have turned up evidence of some of the oldest human activity in coastal Southern California. On Santa Cruz Island, the largest of the Channel Islands, researchers have found three sites scattered with ancient tool-making debris and the shells of harvested shellfish. The youngest of the three sites has been dated to 6,600 BCE, but based on the types of tools found at the other two, archaeologists say they may be as much as 11,000 to 12,000 years old. The artifacts are traces of what's known as the Island Paleocoastal culture,...

It draws on fossil evidence showing Homo sapiens was present in East Africa around 195,000 years ago and that our species had dispersed to the far corners of Eurasia, Australia, and the Americas by 12,000 years ago. This increase in global human populations is linked with a variety of species extinctions, one of the most significant being the reduction by around two-thirds of 150 species of 'megafauna' or big beasts between 50,000 and 10,000 years ago, says the paper, with their disappearance having 'dramatic effects' on the structure of the ecosystem and seed dispersal. ...second... the advent of agriculture worldwide,...

Geneticists re-examining the first settlement of Australia and Papua-New Guinea by modern humans have concluded that the two islands were reached some 50,000 years ago by a single group of people who remained in substantial or total isolation until recent times. The finding, if upheld, would undermine assumptions that there have been subsequent waves of migration into Australia. Analyzing old and new samples of Aborigine DNA, which are hard to obtain because of governmental restrictions, the geneticists developed a detailed picture of the aborigines’ ancestry, as reflected in their Y chromosomes, found just in men, and their mitochondrial DNA, a...

Bus stop an execution site … 1500 years ago By Richard Macey November 26, 2005 Allen Madden and Dr Denise Donion of the University of Sydney with Octavia Man. Photo: Edwina Pickles HIS crime will probably never be known. But "he sure trod on someone's toes", said Allen Madden, cultural and heritage officer for the Metropolitan Local Aboriginal Land Council. In January, when EnergyAustralia workers laying cables in Ocean Street, Narrabeen, found human bones beneath a bus stop, they called police. The remains have since been identified as those of an Aborigine who died up to 1500 years ago. Next...

Contact: Gifford Miller gmiller@colorado.edu 303-492-6962 Jim Scott 303-492-3114 University of Colorado at Boulder Arid Australian interior linked to landscape burning by ancient humans The image of a controlled burn in the interior of Australia today, featured on the cover of the January 2005 issue of Geology, illustrates how Australia might have looked 50,000 years ago. Photo courtesy Gifford Miller, University of Colorado at Boulder Click here for a high resolution photograph. Landscape burning by ancient hunters and gatherers may have triggered the failure of the annual Australian Monsoon some 12,000 years ago, resulting in the desertification of the country's interior...

SYDNEY (AFP) - The chance discovery of the remains of a prehistoric giant kangaroo has cast doubts on the long-held view that climate change drove it and other mega-fauna to extinction, a new study reveals. < > He said that it was likely that hunting killed off Tasmania's mega-fauna -- including the long-muzzled, 120 kilogram (264 pound) giant kangaroo, a rhinoceros-sized wombat and marsupial 'lions' which resembled leopards. < > The finding of the latest study has already been contested, with Judith Field of the University of Sydney saying the idea that humans killed the giant creatures was "in the...

A new study of the 37,000-year old remains of the "Deep Skull" - the oldest modern human discovered in island South-East Asia - has revealed this ancient person was not related to Indigenous Australians, as had been originally thought. The Deep Skull was also likely to have been an older woman, rather than a teenage boy. The research, led by UNSW Australia Associate Professor Darren Curnoe, represents the most detailed investigation of the ancient cranium specimen since it was found in Niah Cave in Sarawak in 1958. "Our analysis overturns long-held views about the early history of this region," says...

The Bramble Cay melomys has become more famous in extinction than it ever was in life. A mouse-like rodent, the melomys amazingly survived on a 3.6 hectare grass-covered cay (a low-lying island in a coral reef) in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef like a ratty Robinson Crusoe for thousands of years. There, it thrived off just a few plant species until human-caused climate change—in the form of rising sea levels and increasing inundations of sea water on the low-lying island—wiped it off the planet. But, while the extinction has been reported widely, articles have missed an important point: the scientists who...

A suspected car bomb was detonated outside a Perth mosque on Tuesday night as hundreds of worshippers attended a prayer service inside. No one inside the Thornlie Mosque was injured when the white 4WD exploded shortly after 8pm outside the Thornlie mosque, near the Australian Islamic College in Perth’s southern suburbs. Anti-Islamic graffiti was also sprayed on a fence.