90-year-old Lorna Prendergast graduated from the University of Melbourne on Saturday with a Masters of Ageing.

The focus of her Masters studies was music as a form of temporary relief for people affected by dementia.

Mrs Prendergast from the small country town of Bairnsdale, received her Masters degree accompanied by her granddaughters at the Royal Exhibition Building in Melbourne.

China’s first ‘cyber-dissident’ whose website reported on sensitive topics including human rights, has been sentenced to 12 years in prison for leaking state secrets.

Huang Qi ran a website called 64 Tianwang, named after the 1984 Tianenmen Square crackdown. 

Deputy director of research at the Chinese Human Rights Defenders, Frances Eve, stated his sentence sends a strong signal to others documenting abuses and will make it harder to know about the human rights abuses going on inside of China.

According to a climate scientist, extreme global temperatures are pushing the human body “close to thermal limits”. 

Record-breaking temperatures have swept through Europe this week with temperatures topping 40 degrees celsius and in areas of South Asia and the Persian Gulf temperatures are reaching 54 degrees celsius.

Dr Tom Matthews from Loughborough University says these high temperatures caused by climate could make certain areas uninhabitable.

Six regional Queensland towns, including Stanthorpe and Warwick,  will soon begin carting drinking water as the state’s drought conditions worsen.

More than 65% of Queensland is now drought declared, the worst affected being Stanthorpe, ont rack to run out of water by Christmas.

Southern Downs Mayor Tracy Dobie is estimating a bill of up to one million dollars a month just to cart water to the town, a sizeable chunk for a regional council with only 19,000 rates-payers.

The family of the disappeared teenager Theo Hayez who went missing on the 31st May in Byron Bay, has not lost hope in search of finding their son.

Theo’s father told a Belgian radio station he believes his son could still be alive, trapped in one of the region’s cults or communes, unable to communicate with the outside world.

Theo’s phone last “pinged” in the cape Byron area, near the lighthouse, on June 1st.

The Australian parliament has approved a new treaty with Timor-Leste governing how the two nations share oil and gas deposits to provide ‘commercial certainty’ for the neighbouring country.

Legislation passed allows for the two countries to split deposits in the long disputed Greater Sunrise fields on the maritime border.

Under the treaty, Timor-Leste will get the biggest share of revenue from exploiting Greater Sunrise.

The Human Rights Law Centre is calling on the NSW government to end routine strip searches of children in juvenile detention centres.

The Law Centre says the latest data reveals strip searches are "unnecessary" and "ineffective" as the searches revealed minimum contraband. 

They suggested the government look at alternative methods, such as the use of wands and body scanners similar to those used at the airport.

More than fifty inmates were killed during a prison riot in northern Brazil on Monday, according to local authorities. 

The incident occurred in the Altamira prison in the state of Para where a fight between rival gangs left 52 inmates dead including 16 who were decapitated.

This clash marks the latest deadly outbreak of violence in Brazil’s over-crowded and riot-prone prisons. 

The source of a gigantic leak of radioactive material that swept across Europe in 2017 has been traced back to a Russian nuclear facility which appears to have been preparing materials for experiments in Italy.

The leak of radioactive ruthenium released up to one-hundred times the amount of radiation into the atmosphere than the Fukushima disaster. 

The Institute for Radioprotection and Nuclear Security in Paris found the source was in the Southern Urals where the Mayak nuclear facility is located.