Sydney - Australia's international airports began installing thermal-imaging scanners Thursday to try to identify incoming passengers who might have contracted swine flu.

Hundreds have been tested for the deadly H1N1 strain of the virus, but there have been no confirmed cases in Australia.

The captains of aircraft arriving from the Americas are obliged to report to quarantine officers any passengers they suspect of having influenza. Passengers are also obliged to fill in a form detailing their health.

Abu Dhabi (UAE), Apr. 30 : Australian fast bowler Brett Lee, who has 310 wickets at 30.81 from 76 Tests and an equal number of wickets in one-day internationals, is hoping to convince selectors of his fitness ahead of the selection of touring parties for both the World Twenty20 and the Ashes.

After this series, he will fly back to South Africa for the final week of the Indian Premier League, where he has been training with the Kings XI Punjab.

Melbourne, Apr 30 : Females of an Australian species of lizard rely on testosterone when they want to put off a male from copulating with her, according to researchers at University of Melbourne.

Evolutionary ecology Dr Devi Stuart-Fox of the University of Melbourne, and colleagues studied the female Lake Eyre dragon lizard (Ctenophorus maculosus) and found that she displays a bright orange belly and throat during parts of her breeding season, which researchers think is driven by the hormone testosterone.

They found that the colour features prominently when the female wants to keep amorous males off their back.

Sydney - Human error was behind an Emirates Airlines jet coming within centimetres of crashing at Melbourne airport last month, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) said Thursday.

Keying in the wrong take-off weight in a flight computer meant the Airbus A340-500 struggled to clear the 2.4-metre perimeter fence.

The plane, carrying 225 passengers on a flight to Dubai, scraped its tail along the tarmac, forcing the pilot to abort the flight and make an emergency landing.

Sydney - Female circumcision is called female genital mutilation (FGM) in Australia and it's a crime.

Those performing it face a possible seven-year prison term and those who don't report it risk a stiff fine.

In Sydney's outer suburb of Auburn, there's a specialist FGM clinic that has been in operation for over 10 years and sees around 40 women a year.

The typical patient is in her 20s, is about to wed, and was operated on by a village midwife in an African or Middle Eastern country when she was young.

Sydney - Getting a good job nowadays doesn't mean you are more likely to stay in employment in these recessionary times.

Research in Australia shows that the common perception that the low-paid have the least job security is a myth.

The Melbourne Institute of Applied Research found that rates of redundancy are "statistically insignificant" when the highly paid are compared with those at the bottom of the scale.