Sydney - Australia

Sydney - Australia looks set to join the United States in boycotting a United Nations anti-racism conference to be held in Switzerland later this month. Foreign Minister Stephen Smith said Monday it was the likely that the Durban Review Conference, to be held April 20-24 in Geneva, could see a reprise of the anti-Semitism that marked the initial South African event in 2001.

Sydney - An Irishman brought home to die after being beaten senseless on a Sydney street in August has surprised his doctors and his family by coming back from the dead in a Cork hospital on St Patrick's Day. David Keohane, 29, came out of a coma eight months after sustaining serious head injuries in the attack, news reports said Monday.

"He's awake, he's talking, he's recognising everyone," a family friend told Irish newspaper the Evening Herald. "He was looking at pictures and he could tell who everyone was, which was amazing."

Sydney, Apr 13 : Hundreds of Tamil demonstrators protesting outside the Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's Sydney residence say that they will stay there until the Australian Government urges the Sri Lankan Government to call for a ceasefire with the Tamil Tigers.

Protester Geetha Mano, 24, said the rally would continue until they got some response from Rudd or Foreign Affairs Minister Stephen Smith.

Sydney, April 13 : Drinking coffee could lower women's risk of suffering a stroke, a new study has suggested.

The study of 83,000 women, conducted over a 24-year period by Harvard Medical School and Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, revealed that women who drank five to seven cups of coffee a week were 12 per cent less likely to have a stroke than were those who downed just one cup a month.

However, German experts on stroke prevention in Berlin say that the benefit does not appear to come from caffeine, reports the Sydney Morning Herald.

Sydney, Apr. 10 : The head of Australia's Catholic Church, Cardinal George Pell said today that most AIDS-afflicted countries were ''awash with condoms''.

Cardinal Pell said he agreed with Pope Benedict XVI that condoms were aggravating the African AIDS epidemic by encouraging promiscuity.

"The idea that you can solve a great spiritual and health crisis like AIDS with a few mechanical contraptions like condoms is ridiculous," Cardinal Pell said.