Sydney  - Fortescue Metals Group Ltd said Tuesday that it had received Australian government approval for Chinese steel maker Hunan Valin Iron and Steel to pay 645 million Australian dollars (441 million US dollars) for a 17.5-per-cent stake in the nation's third-largest iron ore miner.

Under what's known as a stand-still agreement, Valin will undertake to hold no more than 17.5 per cent of Fortescue.

Fortescue chief executive Andrew Forrest, who owns 35 per cent of Fortescue, said in August his company would remain Australian controlled.

Sydney, March 31 : A new study has found that stressed mushroom corals can switch from male to female and back again, the first to show that coral can change sex in either direction, all for conserving energy.

According to a report by ABC News, researchers at Tel Aviv University in Israel conducted the study.

Mushroom corals belong to a family called Fungiidae. They are solitary, mobile species that live throughout the Pacific and Indian Oceans.

Melbourne, Mar. 31: Australian tennis star Lleyton Hewitt and his wife Bec have started legal action against the New Idea magazine after it claimed the actress was seeing another man - who in reality was her brother.

The magazine ran a cover story titled "Bec''s other man" and claimed she was spending more and more time with a "hunky" American fitness trainer.

The magazine carried photographs of Bec and "Minder Mark" with the Hewitts'' two young children.

Sydney  - Canberra police stand guard as a motorcade sweeps along closed roads in a blaze of black metal and shiny chrome.

It's not a visiting head of state going by but the bullet-holed body of slain motorcycle gang leader Richard Roberts.

Australia's motorcycle gangs are at war and police in the national capital are out in the streets making sure vengeance is left to another day.

Melbourne - Ferrari have reacted with a large degree of self-criticism to the Italian team's disappointing start to the 2009 Formula One season when Felipe Massa and Kimi Raikkonen both finished out of the points in the Australian Grand Prix in Melbourne.

"This was, no matter what way you look at it, definitely not a start worthy of Ferrari. It was a day to forget," said Ferrari team principal Stefano Domenicali after Massa and Raikkonen failed to point at the season-opening race won by Jenson Button of Brawn GP.

Melbourne - Jenson Button says there is more to come from his Brawn GP Formula One team in 2009 after the British driver and team-mate Rubens Barrichello finished first and second in Sunday's season-opening Australian Grand Prix in Melbourne.

Button led from start to finish at the Albert Park circuit as Brawn GP become the first debut team to finish one-two since 1954, when Juan Manuel Fangio led home Karl Kling for Mercedes in the French Grand Prix.