Sydney, Apr 7 : Australian Skipper Ricky Ponting has backed his openers Brad Haddin and Michael Clarke to bounce back and has publicly challenged himself to lift his game after being thrashed by South Africa in the second game of their one-day international series.

Australia were blown away by pace duo Wayne Parnell (4-25) and Dale Steyn (4-27) at Centurion as South Africa bowled the tourists out for 131 and scored 3-132 in 26.2 overs in reply.

Sydney  - Swimmer Nick D'Arcy was Tuesday kicked off the Australian team for July's world championships in Rome following his conviction for assaulting former Commonwealth Games champion Simon Cowley.

Last year's assault left Cowley with a broken nose, eye socket, jaw and cheekbone, and metal plates in his jaw and skull.

The case came to court last month and D'Arcy was given a 14-month suspended sentence.

The incident forced D'Arcy's exclusion from the Beijing Olympics and his conviction is likely to end his career.

Sydney  - The Reserve Bank of Australia on Tuesday cut its benchmark interest rate by 0.25 percentage points to 3 per cent in hopes of breathing life into the somnolent economy.

It was the fifth cut in six months in the rate the central bank charges banks for borrowing.

The further easing of monetary policy came on the heels of figures showing a further fall in inflation. The bank said it now sees recession as a worse threat than inflation.

Sydney  - The Australian government Tuesday scrapped a tender process and announced it would form a new company to build a national high-speed fibre-optic broadband network.

The company would be a public-private partnership, with Canberra selling its majority stake when the 43-billion-Australian-dollar (30- billion-US-dollar) project is completed.

"It's the most ambitious, far-reaching and long-term nation- building infrastructure project ever undertaken by an Australian government," Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said.

Sydney - The list of 801 Jews threatened by Nazi persecution that was drawn up by German industrialist Oskar Schindler in 1945 has resurfaced in Australia and will go on show at a Sydney library, news reports said Monday.

It's actually a carbon-copy, typed at the same time as the carbon copy that is among the prized exhibits at the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem, but it's priceless all the same because few carbon copies survived and the original has never been found.

Sydney, Apr 6 : One in 10 young Australian women take illicit drugs to reduce weight, according to a survey.

Conducted for Grazia magazine, the survey has shown that 10 per cent of women used stimulants like cocaine and speed in a bid to shed weight.

While 67 per cent were in a healthy weight range, 57 per cent of the young women considered themselves overweight, of which another 57 per cent wanted to be size 8 or smaller.