It has been confirmed by both Australian and Israeli authorities that Israel intelligence agencies helped avert the Sydney incident where a pair of brothers planned to smuggle a homemade bomb onto an Etihad plane.

At the time, Australian authorities said the brothers backed out of their plan before reaching security for unknown reasons.

Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton said during a radio interview that Israel was directly involved in uncovering the brothers and that they were very grateful for the assistance the fellow nation provided.

Prisoners at Woodford Correctional Centre are also a fan of Australian animals with several being warned for keeping wildlife as pets.

Prisoners were discovered to have been keeping a small lizard, a snake and a quail in the prison, which likely came from surrounding bushland.

The prisoners have been issued with a warning and the animals have been returned to the wild.

Twenty taxidermy specimens have been dug out of the Queensland Museum archives and wheeled into the Workshop Rail Museum in Ipswich.

The exhibits featured were part of a larger collection which was a Proceeds of Crime seizure by the Commonwealth of Australia.

The exhibition, called ‘A Room For Wild Animals’, went on display Monday and will remain open to the public until the 16th of April.

Brussels has announced they will be making all public transport free on days when the city’s air pollution reaches above a certain level.

The move is part of several measures, including reducing car speed limits and the usage of wood burning stoves as well as banning high polluting cars and electrifying buses.

These measures are all aimed at bringing the air pollution down to levels set by the European Union.

Russia has reported a five-hour ceasefire in the bombing of rebel-held Syrian region of East Ghouta.

The ceasefire between 9am and 2pm local time allowed wounded civilians to escape through a ‘humanitarian corridor.’

The ‘pause’ by the Russian military follows the 30 day ceasefire across the whole of Syria ordered by the United Nations on the weekend.

Senior Victorian police officer and head of Victoria Police’s ethical standards body, Brett Guerin, resigned after having links to racist comments on social media.

Mr Guerin was exposed by Fairfax Media after they reported the racist YouTube comments made under the same name as a character from the 1970 film Airport.

In a statement released yesterday, the Victorian Police said that Mr Guerin’s resignation was also linked to an ongoing Independent Broad-based Anti Corruption Commission investigation.

Over the course of today the country is getting to know its new deputy Prime Minister.

The fifty-three year former newspaper editor is quickly coming under scrutiny for notably homophobic comments he made in 1993.

McCormack wrote in an editor’s letter in his Wagga Wagga paper that homosexuals were “sordid” and “unnatural”.

A local Brisbane artist is putting two years worth of her landscape artworks on display for the public in Gatton.

Meredith Howse’s art style is known as Romantic Sublime, which sees nature as the most sublime object and aims to invoke emotions of awe and wonder in observers.

The art collection will be on display at the Lockyer Valley Art House in Gatton until the tenth of March.

This is a free event.

Brisbane bus drivers were ordered to turn off their air conditioning while waiting to start their routes this past weekend.

Bus drivers are required to switch off their engines after sitting for 30 seconds and managers ensured that these rules were not broken despite the weekend heat.

Brisbane City Council shadow transport spokesman, Jared Cassidy, claimed this policy is poorly conceived and endangers workers.