March 19, 2013 Visa and American Express the first credit card companies to restrict unpopular surcharges.

March 19, 2013 Mateship is inherent in Australian culture. It can be a noble sentiment. But when does doing a favour for a mate cross the boundary into corrupt conduct, particularly when one is the mining minister entrusted with state assets worth billions, the other a factional ally?

March 19, 2013 Two Australian brothers pulled big crowds at the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival.

March 19, 2013 Cocaine is a 'luxury' drug in Australia, with users paying up to four times as much as in the UK.

March 19, 2013 The International Committee of the Red Cross is appealing to the Australian Government to help create a global push for greater protection of medical teams in war zones and areas of humanitarian crisis.

March 18, 2013 In the flesh, Bindi Irwin is both bigger than you remember her and smaller than you might imagine.

March 18, 2013 Australia is wasting more than a billion dollars a year by paying up to 64 times too much for some prescription drugs, according to a former top federal health bureaucrat.

March 18, 2013 Julia Gillard enters a politically dangerous last sitting week before the May budget, with support for her government stuck in the basement and her standing with voters losing ground to a more popular Tony Abbott.

March 18, 2013 Nuclear armed countries - including the US - are at best only paying lip service to the promise of President Barack Obama to rid the world of atomic bombs.

March 18, 2013 Getting too attached to a chook is risky. That's one of the lessons learnt by students at Muirfield High School in Sydney's north-west who for the first time are entering the Royal Easter Show's egg-laying and chicken-meat competitions for schools. Of the eight egg-laying pullets they received in November as eight-week-old chicks, only five remain: Comet, Cupid, Blixen, Prancer and Rudolph.