Member Submitted/Breaking News

AUSTRALIA'S security and law enforcement agencies are world leaders in telecommunications interception and data access and like most successful industries, they want more. Federal Attorney-General Nicola Roxon is canvassing a further expansion of surveillance powers, most controversially a requirement that telecommunications and internet service providers retain at least two years of data for access by government agencies. Security and privacy are in the balance as the Federal Parliament's secretive joint committee on intelligence and security considers Australia's future digital surveillance regime.

The U.S. military has designated Julian Assange and WikiLeaks as enemies of the United States -- the same legal category as the al-Qaeda terrorist network and the Taliban insurgency. Declassified U.S. Air Force counter-intelligence documents, released under U.S. freedom-of-information laws, reveal that military personnel who contact WikiLeaks or WikiLeaks supporters may be at risk of being charged with 'communicating with the enemy.'

AUSTRALIA will increase its dependence on foreign sources of oil with the decision by Caltex to close the Kurnell refinery - the second of Sydney's two oil refineries - with the loss of several hundred jobs.

"Australia, the second-biggest wheat exporter, is set to be drier-than-normal in the next three months, curbing grain production just as the worst drought in a generation parches fields across the U.S., the largest shipper."

THE local fallout from the collapse of international derivatives trader MF Global is being played out in the New South Wales Supreme Court, where the liquidator, Deloitte, is asking how it can allocate available sums to clients who are owed $309 million

In Australia, the editors-in-chief of the Fairfax-owned Melbourne paper The Age and Sydney Morning Herald newspapers have quit.

QANTAS management is warning the airline could ''go under'' if the state-owned Etihad is allowed to buy enough of a share of Virgin Australia to allow it to start undercutting Qantas on its profitable domestic routes.

Aircraft engineers have accused Qantas of endangering the public by cutting back on safety checks before flights.

TEN thousand more jobs will be cut from the public service and speeding fines will rise by 12.5 per cent to help drag the NSW budget back into surplus from a forecast deficit of more than $800 million next financial year.