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.

An Australian gold mining company will donate $300,000 towards the development of a rapid cancer test at The University of Queensland.

The funding from Evolution Mining will help researchers optimise a new gold nanoparticle blood test which could give oncologists an early and more accurate diagnosis.

Professor of Nanoscience Matt Trau who leads the project said it is visionary for a mining company to support cutting-edge medical research.