India's parliament has approved a bill that makes the Muslim practice of "instant divorce" a criminal offence, which can have men jailed for up to three years.

"Triple talaq", as it's known, allows a husband to divorce his wife by repeating the word "talaq", or “divorce”, three times in any form, including email or text message, and was declared unconstitutional in 2017.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has celebrated the vote as "a victory of gender justice".

Brisbane City Council has rejected a proposal for a seven-storey development that would have partially demolished a heritage building and created floors of tiny single-room apartments in Nundah. 

The development at 1180 Sandgate Road would have demolished part of the 1920s-era Henry Thomas Chemist shop and included forty ‘smart’ studio apartments, with fold-out furniture built into the walls. 

Brisbane City Council will be subject to a raft of "non-compliance" measures for its bus network under a new contract between the council and TransLink.

The measures will force the council to answer to TransLink if it triggers a threshold for the number of buses missing routes, running behind or ahead of schedule, or if quarterly customer satisfaction falls below par.

Former Australian Federal Police Commissioner Mick Palmer has called for pill testing to be introduced at Australian music festivals, saying it is time for the nation to accept police-based prohibition has failed. 

Mr Palmer says young people are continuing to take drugs at music festivals despite anti-drug campaigns and sniffer dogs, and evidence from European countries have allowed pill testing for almost 20 years is impossible to ignore. 

NSW parliament won't debate a bill to decriminalise abortion until next week after it came under fire from conservative MPs and anti-abortion advocates. 

The private members' bill would allow for terminations up to 22 weeks and later if two doctors "consider that, in all the circumstances, the termination should be performed".

Double Olympic champion Caster Semenya will not defend her 800m title at the World Championships in September after the Swiss Federal Tribunal reversed a ruling that temporarily suspended the IAAF’s testosterone regulations. 

The South African runner had been expected to compete at the World Championships in Doha after the Swiss Supreme Court had temporarily exempted her from an IAAF rule relating to athletes with differences in sexual development, however that decision has now been overturned. 

North Korea has fired multiple unidentified projectiles less than a week after firing two new short-range ballistic missiles, the South Korean military's Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) says.

The latest launches early on Wednesday were from the Hodo peninsula on North Korea's east coast, the same area where last week's launches were conducted. 

A group of seven residents from Bribie Island and Sandstone point have filed an appeal in the Planning and Environment Court in Brisbane against a Moreton Bay Regional Council decision to allow more outdoor music concerts at a nearby hotel complex. 

The Sandstone Point Hotel has recently hosted a number of outdoor events with as many as 10,000 in attendance, and residents say they are concerned about noise pollution and impacts to the environment.