More than 4000 firefighters are making progress in controlling California's largest wildfire on record, but the death toll is continuing to rise.

Protestors gathered in Sydney and Melbourne on Thursday afternoon calling on Qantas and Jetstar to refuse to carry unsuccessful asylum seekers whom the federal government wants to deport.

Cats are being blamed for the spread of native wildlife-killing toxoplasmosis as calls for urgent action to tackle the infection are being called.

As feral cat populations in Tasmania have grown, toxo as it's known, has taken a massive toll on local wildlife, spreading through the urine and faeces of cats to mammals, with humans being susceptible.

 

At least $850 000 parking fines in Brisbane issued by the Brisbane City Council have been successful overturned by Brisbane residents.

Amongst the top reasons for incorrect parking fines were officer errors and faulty meters, along with the incorrect registration or meter and resident parking permits not being displayed.

Opposition councillor, Jared Cassidy, said 13,106 fines had been issued that shouldn’t have been.

An NBA scam is threatening to disconnect thousands of Queensland households from the Internet, with one woman being harassed over the phone eight times in the past three days.

Chinese infrastructure in the Pacific island region built through soft loans appears to have peaked and a “hangover is setting in” as countries have to start repaying debts, a major study has found.

An exception is Papua New Guinea, which has signed up to Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative and would see a steep climb in Chinese infrastructure spending if a proposed $4.7 billion national road project goes ahead.

A major score-rigging scandal has engulfed one of Tokyo's medical schools, with an investigation revealing the university deliberately marked down all female applicants to limit the number of women studying at the school.

It is understood the senior officials at Tokyo Medical University wanted to keep the number of women at about 30
per cent, so they altered the computerised marking system.

The practice had reportedly been going on for more than a decade.

Former governor-general Dr Peter Hollingworth is being urged to forego hundreds of thousands of dollars from his taxpayer-funded pension and entitlements he receives every year.

 

Dr Hollingworth resigned as governor-general in 2003 after a series of scandals over his handling of sexual abuse allegations against priests and teaching staff while he was the archbishop of Brisbane in the 1990s.

Schools and parents will get NAPLAN results this month, but the agency responsible did not say whether it would still provide an accurate national picture of student performance.

Senior state education officials raised questions on Wednesday about whether results from the new online NAPLAN test, sat by students at a fifth of Australian schools in May, was statistically comparable with results from the pen-and-paper version sat by everyone else.