The Brisbane City Council has backtracked on its controversial plan to allow retirement and aged care developers to build on sport and recreation grounds.

Lord Mayor Graham Quirk said it was not his desire to see the issue of the shortage of aged care and retirement places to be caught up in community controversy.

The council will commence consultation on the aged care proposal in the coming weeks.

Anti-bias training will see Starbucks close 8,000 of its US stores today after two African American men were arrested in a Philadelphia store last month.

Starbucks chairman, Howard Schultz, wants the training to start a conversation and says employees will watch a documentary and discuss their own experience of discrimination.

The decision is estimated to cost the company up to $14 million dollars in lost sales.

A study has found Puerto Rico’s Hurricane Maria killed 4,645 people, which is 70 times more than the official Government death toll.

The September 2017 hurricane caused billions of dollars of damage to infrastructure and left 3.4 million residents without power or water.

Authors of the study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, attributed the mortality rate to delayed health care.

The NSW Government has chosen The Nature Conservatory, in partnership with Aboriginal and scientific groups to be the managers of the Nimmie-Caira project.

The 85,000 hectare site will be devoted to environmental restoration, with plans for low-impact grazing, ecotourism and carbon farming.

All profits made from these activities will go back into environmental restoration work on the property.

Rural Australians will be able to access the same range of products that city dwellers have with “Ebay Plus” launching at the end of next month.

According to Ebay’s Senior Director of Shipping, David Ramage, Ebay Plus is aimed at regular shoppers who have been put off by delivery fees in the past.

Ebay Plus has a $49 monthly subscription fee which includes shipping, giving rural Australians the same products without added fees.

Overnight, a teenage male has been arrested and charged following the lock down of The Lakes College, a school in North Brisbane.

Yesterday at 4pm, the school was forced into lock down after receiving a bomb threat via email.

Most students had left the campus by this time and Principal Simon Armstrong said the school would operate as normal today.

Rankin’s newsagent on Queen St Mall officially closed its doors for the last time.

The iconic store was the centerpiece of the mall for the past 35 years and more than six thousand people signed the petition to keep it open..