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After two long years of forecasts, calculations, and waiting, it’s finally happening… The global weather event called El Niño is back. This happens every few years, when the waters in the Pacific Ocean, primarily off the coast of South America, become warmer. This heats the air above the ocean and disrupts the normal west-to-east flow of Pacific winds. In turn, this shifts the usual areas of cloud formation, causing unusual fluctuations in rainfall and temperatures. The Australian Bureau of Meteorology recently joined the U.S. Climate Prediction Center and the Japan Meteorological Agency in saying that Pacific Ocean temperatures have risen...

A mother has been found guilty of duping her former partner into thinking she had an abortion in order to give his child to her gay friend. A jury at Perth Sheriff Court found the woman and her male friend guilty of an elaborate fraud. The court heard the pair hatched a "cynical and calculated" plot to cover up who the child's real father was. The woman, aged 29, and her 35-year-old male friend were warned they could face up to five years in prison. Sheriff William Wood described the offence as "very serious" and paid tribute to the child's...

EXCLUSIVE: A former senior government adviser who enjoyed privileged access to top-secret information about the navy’s future submarine project has taken a high paid job with one of three foreign contenders for the $20 billion plus contract. Sean Costello was chief-of-staff to former Defence Minister David Johnston and left his $250,000-a-year government job in January this year. He began work in April — just four months later — as Chief Executive Officer with French Government shipbuilder DCNS Australia. The firm is engaged in a “competitive evaluation process” for the Navy’s future submarine contract alongside Germany’s Thyssen Krupp Marine Systems (TKMS)...

Running on Australian TV news. Man arrested in Martin Place, Sydney. Largescale police operation.

WILLIAM MacDonald, known as The Mutilator and NSW’s oldest and longest-serving prisoner, has died in Sydney’s Prince of Wales Hospital. MacDonald, who would have been 91 next month, terrorised Sydney in the early 1960s, killing four men in city parks and one earlier in Brisbane by luring them into dark places and then mutilating their genitalia. Many believe he was Australia’s first high-profile serial killer. His victims, mostly derelicts, were stabbed dozens of times with a long-bladed knife before MacDonald would cut off their penis and testicles. Between 1961 and 1962, MacDonald was responsible for a series of grisly murders...

Hollywood star Johnny Depp will have his two pet dogs seized by Australian authorities and possibly put down after he failed to declare them on the an in-flight manifest. The Department of Agriculture is investigating Depp after it emerged he was currently in Australia with his two Yorkshire terriers. Officers from the Department of Agriculture have issued Depp and Heard with 48-hours notice to either remove the dogs voluntarily from the country or have them seized. Agriculture Minister Barnaby Joyce said this morning the two pooches needed to return home. “It doesn’t matter if Johnny Depp has been awarded sexiest...

THE $90 million search for MH370 has discovered “man made objects” almost four kilometres under the surface of the southern Indian Ocean, but they are not the missing Boeing 777. Instead the debris is thought to be from an ancient shipwreck, comprising an anchor and other items. Australian Transport Safety Bureau Operational Search Director Peter Foley said they were “obviously disappointed” the discovery was not the missing aircraft.

A dad has been incorrectly accused of being a pedophile on Facebook by a woman he doesn't know. The woman is now mortified and begging for forgiveness. Both say they are "devastated" by the events surrounding the misunderstanding. The moral of the story: Don't post stupid things on social media.

FOR years it was the pride of the Muslim community, a school that reached out to its neighbours and helped promote cultural understanding across Adelaide. Migrant students from across the globe were taught to be proudly Australian, regularly singing the national anthem and their own school song. But they don’t sing any more. A deep rift between parents and management threatens the future of the Islamic College of South Australia. Relations have soured to the point where hundreds of parents kept their children at home on Friday in protest against the school’s board and they say they will organise more...

Several people have been killed in a shooting in the Swiss canton of Aargau, police say.

A new blog post written by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) may appear to be an attempt to align with Hillary Clinton, but it takes direct aim at multiple Clinton Foundation donors. Warren’s post, “I agree with Hillary Clinton,” details her concerns with a provision in the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement that she says “would let foreign companies challenge American laws outside of American courts.” “The Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) provision isn’t a one-time, hypothetical problem—we’ve seen it in past trade agreements,” Warren wrote. Three of the five companies Warren uses as examples of companies that have abused similar...

Prince Harry ended his month long embed with the Australian military by stalking buildings with an assault rifle, abseiling from helicopters and raiding ships with a team of navy divers. The Captain Wales performed a series of counter-terrorism exercises as a part of his commitments with the military. Harry also trained in the country's arid north in bush survival skills, including how to source food and water. The 30-year-old also spent time flying helicopters, training with SAS commandos and taking part in drills with Royal Australian Navy Clearance Divers. Harry, who is due to quit the British Army in June,...

A youth sits restrained after the police raid in Greenvale. Source: Supplied POLICE swooped and arrested a doctor’s teenage son in Melbourne before bombs were found at his Greenvale home, foiling an “imminent terror plot”. A boy, 14, was also targeted in raids in Sydney. It is believed there was a plot to detonate three bombs in an attack planned in Melbourne on Sunday. Victorian bomb squad officers found improvised explosives at a home in Greenvale in the northern suburbs. Dramatic photos obtained by the Herald Sun showed the arrested teen handcuffed and sitting under police guard. Police ran controlled...

Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s top business adviser on Friday claimed climate change was a ruse encouraged by the United Nations to create a new authoritarian world order under its control. Maurice Newman, chairman of the Prime Minister’s Business Advisory Council, said the real agenda was “concentrated political authority. Global warming is the hook.” In a column for The Australian newspaper to coincide with a visit by U.N. climate chief Christiana Figueres, he added that the world had been “subjected to extravagance from climate catastrophists for close to 50 years.” “It’s a well-kept secret, but 95 percent of the climate models...

Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s top business advisor on Friday claimed climate change was a ruse encouraged by the United Nations to create a new authoritarian world order under its control. Maurice Newman, chairman of the Prime Minister’s Business Advisory Council, said the real agenda was “concentrated political authority. Global warming is the hook”. In a column for The Australian newspaper to coincide with a visit by UN climate chief Christiana Figueres, he added that the world had been “subjected to extravagance from climate catastrophists for close to 50 years”. “It’s a well-kept secret, but 95 percent of the climate...

Japan will agree this month to give Australia classified submarine data, an unprecedented step signaling Tokyo’s intent to join competitive bidding to sell Canberra a fleet of stealth subs, said two Japanese officials familiar with the plan. The “competitive assessment” will see Germany’s ThyssenKrupp and France’s state-controlled naval contractor DCNS separately competing with a Japanese government-led bid for such contractors as Kawasaki Heavy Industries Ltd. and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd. Japan had been the front-runner in the planned sale of around 12 vessels, for as much as $40 billion, to replace Australia’s ageing Collins class submarines, sources have said, until...

Aboriginal leader Noel Pearson has challenged indigenous Australians to get over their traumatic history in the same way that Jews survived the Holocaust. Mr Pearson yesterday declared that alcohol was damaging indigenous communities far more than the past wrongs inflicted on Aborigines. “I honestly believe people can rise above historic trauma, otherwise we’ll lose agency and we’re defeated by history,” he told the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists annual congress in Brisbane. “I have to push back against too much attribution to past, to people’s present troubles. Whatever the scars and the burdens that people coming out...

IF you believe reporter Peter Hartcher, our Prime Minister decides mid-flight he doesn’t want to be met at the airport by a gay. If you believe Hartcher’s claims in the Sydney Morning Herald and Age on Wednesday, Tony Abbott actually checked who’d be in the greeting party when he landed in Paris on Anzac Day. You also believe Abbott got a staffer to ring ahead and tell the gay guy on the list — the Australian ambassador’s partner — to “sit in the car” instead. Seriously? Abbott has copped plenty of abuse from the media, portraying him as a lying,...

Given Tony Abbott has been dubbed a misogynist, Islamophobe and racist, I suppose the ­occasional allegation of homophobia shouldn’t be a surprise. But having met Abbott through a mutual, and dear, gay friend more than 20 years ago, it has ­always bemused me. Each time it is attempted, the slur is revealed as increasingly absurd and desperate. Christopher Pearson, a former columnist for this newspaper, was my openly gay editor at The Adelaide Review in the 1990s when he developed a friendship with ­Abbott through an organisation that was anathema to me, Australians for Constitutional Monarchy. Pearson, from the start,...

So many disputes in our liberal democratic society hinge on the tension between inequality and fairness: between groups, between sexes, between individuals, and increasingly between families. The power of the family to tilt equality hasn’t gone unnoticed, and academics and public commentators have been blowing the whistle for some time. Now, philosophers Adam Swift and Harry Brighouse have felt compelled to conduct a cool reassessment. Swift in particular has been conflicted for some time over the curious situation that arises when a parent wants to do the best for her child but in the process makes the playing field for...