Domestic violence and homelessness outreach groups have renewed their calls for a dedicated female homeless shelter in Alice Springs following a spike in the number of women in the city sleeping rough and being assaulted.

The Northern Territory has the highest rates of homelessness in Australia, and yet Alice Springs, its biggest regional town, has no emergency accommodation facility for women fearing for their own safety.

A new report commissioned to review the two days of train chaos Sydney faced last month has found that the city’s tangled rail network and crew shortages were major contributing factors towards the system’s failure.

These major failures stopped trains on the tracks for 48 hours, left thousands of commuters stranded and saw other passengers turned away from stations due to overcrowding.

There are reports Manus Island refugees staying in a Port Moresby hotel have been stripped of their phone cards, just one month after they were also denied their weekly allowance for necessities such as toiletries.

The men had previously been given two phone cards a week, however after the security contract for the hotel was transferred, the cards have not been given out.

The contract states that the refugees staying in Port Moresby, and those still on Manus Island should receive a $30 weekly allowance for phone calls.

International aid has finally reached the besieged, rebel-held Eastern Ghouta region in Syria yesterday.

The convoy of nine trucks delivered aid to over 7,000 civilians with enough medical and food supplies to sustain them for a month.

Aid workers say the region is in desperate need of more convoys, with about 400,000 people currently living under the government-imposed siege.

A dog, newly renamed Tippie, has made a miracle escape from the back of a tip truck west of Brisbane.

The RSPCA has released CCTV footage of the dog riding atop a swirling torrent of rubbish and narrowly missing the truck’s descending crusher blades.

RSPCA’s Queensland spokesman Michael Beatty says that the society suspects Tippie was deliberately thrown in with a bin’s contents and are appealing to anyone with information regarding the incident to contact the animal emergency hotline on 1300 264 625.

Queensland’s Environment Department has given the New Acland Coal expansion a second chance after the company lost its trial in the Land Courts last year.

Due to the mine’s unpredictable effect on long-term groundwater supplies, the court ruled against its expansion into agricultural land on Queensland’s Darling Downs.

However, despite the court’s ruling, New Acland Coal was recently again invited by the Environment Department to submit water modelling at the end of last year.  

A push for changes to be made to the controversial testing system of NAPLAN has been made by the nation’s education ministers.

New South Wales Education Minister Rob Stokes believes NAPLAN is not doing its job of helping schools and teachers improve students learning.

The nation’s Education Ministers are eager to review the test to make it simple, clear and flexible as the focus of the test is seen to create high stress for teachers, students and parents.

A small number of donors have begun to withdraw their donations from the Australian arm of Oxfam following revelations that senior staff from Oxfam UK paid local women in Haiti for sex during the organisation’s relief efforts in the country following the 2010 earthquake disaster.

The charity’s UK arm has already been threatened with a 50 million pound funding cut from the British government and its deputy chief executive has resigned over the matter.  

International critics are concerned that Cambodia’s ruling party led by Hun Sen will continue to drag the country further into dictatorship, following the party’s release of its next five year plan.

The party has said it will increase surveillance, shut out any opposition force and prevent the spread of misinformation.

These plans crush any hope that Hun Sen will re-establish political freedom and democracy in Cambodia following the country’s mid-year elections.