Mining company Regis Resources was due to set up a gold mine in Blayney , New South Wales .

But mining minister Tanya Plibersek ordered the mine to be protected under the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Heritage Protection Act 1984 .

The Wiradjuri people claim they have a significant spiritual connection to the area, citing a mythological bee story about the site.

The current campaign finance bill is a mixed bag of worthy reforms and political manipulation.

Aspects of it are also vulnerable to constitutional challenge.

It will strengthen donation disclosures by lowering the disclosure threshold to donations of $ 1,000 and requiring more timely disclosure.

The bill imposes a $ 20,000 cap in total for all donations by a single donor to a political party.

A Congolese paedophile convicted of sexually assaulting his stepdaughter has been allowed to remain in the UK .

By capitulating to the ECHR , we’re putting the rights of dangerous criminals above the safety of the public.

This is one of many examples of British courts and tribunals prioritising rights of criminals.

The GIJN community re-elected four current board members whose terms expired this year .

Guilherme Amado joins the board for the first time, while incumbents Rana Sabbagh and Marina Walker Guevara are re-electionees.

In all, 13 candidates vied for seven seats on the 15 -member board.

Board members serve for two years .

Economic growth will stay anaemic, not exceeding 2% in any of the next five years .

Budget could have done more to put our health and care services back on their feet.

For our economy to grow, this has to change, and that requires strategic investments.

SMEs have suffered a bruising few years , punctuated by an energy crisis, a pandemic, staff shortages, rising interest rates and political uncertainty.

The House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a bill banning contracts with Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro ’s regime on Monday .

The bill would prohibit the U.S. government from contracting with any person that has business operations with the illegitimate government of Maduro , as well as any successor government of Venezuela not recognized as legitimate.

Sue Gray was sacked from Downing Street after just 94 days as Keir Starmer's chief of staff.

The Sun on Sunday revealed that this was down to yet another row over pay.

Gray's salary of 170,000 was higher than that of the Prime Minister's 166,786 .

Gray was partly responsible for spad salary decisions.

Britain is an outlier in how it treats politically appointed advisers.

Recommendations include recasting spads as valuable assets’ rather than a form of necessary evil’ and increasing their pay by a blanket 10 per cent .

This won’t be popular at a time of cost-cutting, especially given how fast spad numbers have grown over the Tory years.

The EU has been the biggest provider of aid to Ukraine , allocating 118 billion ( $127 billion ) since the start of the conflict.

The U.S. has provided 85 billion in total, although the flow of money has tailed off this year , with just 17 billion allocated.

Some officials argue that Europe should bide its time until Trump ’s inauguration to find out his intentions toward Ukraine .

The construction industry is sacred to both the left and the right, writes Simon Jenkins .

It may be the world’s greatest polluter, but it is not to be criticised.

The industry accounts for a staggering 37% of global emissions’, more than any other single source.

Emmanuel Carrère's new book is an attempt to tell a story with a good ending about France ’s national crisis of 2015 .

V13, published in France in 2022 and now in English translation, collects the columns he filed for the French weekly L’Obs from the trial of 20 men accused of involvement in the November 2015 attacks.

Michel Houellebecq’s Submission was released on 7 January 2015 , by diabolical coincidence the same day as the Charlie Hebdo attacks.

The novel imagines a Muslim takeover of France via a 2022 presidential election in which the left forms an alliance with Islamists to block the far right.

French writer Philippe Carrère 's best work emerges from his sometimes queasy identification with individual men and women.

He is as frequently accused of solipsism as he is praised for his spooky perceptiveness about other people.

Carrère and Louis share a habit of compulsive introspection, but nothing could be more alien to Carrère than Louis’s broad structural vision.