Federal Education Minister Simon Birmingham has defended the standardised NAPLAN tests against recent criticisms by world-renowned Finish educator Pasi Sahlberg.

Mr. Sahlberg publicly criticised standardised testing systems for skewing school teaching objectives towards the test and away from broader skills like play.

However, Mr. Birmingham stresses that the NAPLAN test is only one assessment tool amongst many, and shouldn’t be considered the be all and end all of school performance.

Inflation figures released today show people are paying more for life essentials like fuel, electricity and rent than ever before, but as the cost of living goes up wages are staying largely the same.

With people having less spendable income, retailers are being forced to discount recreational and fashion items heavily to try and encourage shoppers in store.

Experts say people are paying for the essentials before they hit the shops, leaving retailers doing whatever it takes to bring in business.

The Queensland Logan Coaches bus driver, where a five year old girl was left alone and trapped on the vehicle for hours, has been sacked.

Bus driver, Ross Belsham, accepts he is partly responsible however there were many factors contributed to the girl being unnoticed on January 22.

Mr Belsham was sacked on Tuesday and an online petition has started to help him get his job back.

In a world first, an accurate blood test for Alzheimer’s disease has been developed by a team of scientists from Australia and Japan.

The test is able to pick up biological markers in blood plasma that show the build-up of the protein amyloid-beta at least 20 years before symptoms begin.

For 30 years, Professor Colin Masters from the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health has been studying Alzheimer’s and said the blood test will make diagnosis easier, cheaper and more broadly available.

Mountains of newspaper, cardboard, and office scraps are piling up in Hong Kong after a Chinese ban on 24 types of unprocessed rubbish imports left the city stranded with its trash.

Last year Hong Kong exported 90 percent of it recyclables to China and has no effective recycling industry of it own.

Hong Kong’s 7 million inhabitants produce 5.6 million tonnes of landfill annually, little of which is recycled.

The excavation of more than 7,000 stone tools in India has left archaeologists confused about who made them.

The scrapers, blades and points made with an advanced stone-shaping technique were dated to about 385,000 years ago, almost 250,000 years earlier than experts thought the techniques were first used.

The lack of fossil evidence means it’s difficult to pinpoint who made the tools, but archaeologists said it was probably not modern humans.

The Tasmanian government has clarified the Taiwanese ban on fruit imports from the state this morning.

Yesterday, it was announced Taiwan had banned the importation of all Tasmanian fruit due to concerns about fruit fly, however it is now understood it is just fruit grown in identified exclusion zones.

The state is experiencing an unprecedented crisis after the pest was found in two separate locations.

ASIO officers are reported to have visited the ABC’s Brisbane studios around 1am this morning.

The officers sought to secure the classified Cabinet documents recently discovered in two locked filing cabinets at a second-hand furniture depot in Canberra.

This huge national security breach is said to be the largest of its kind in Australian political history and while the ABC still has access to the documents, negotiations are currently underway between the national broadcaster and the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet.

Brisbane city council has joined a global movement called Love Food Hate Waste, and are encouraging residents to reduce their food waste.

Brisbane residents alone throw away 97, 000 tonnes of food into landfill each year, which is equivalent to one in five shopping bags.

The initiative will be broken up into six, week long challenges designed to help educate people how changes in their routine could help reduce their contribution to landfill.