Sydney - A Sydney man who published a manual on the internet about how to carry out car bombings and assassinations and blow up planes was convicted Wednesday of providing assistance in a terrorist attack.

Belal Khazaal, 38, who argued that his book was just a compilation of information available elsewhere on the internet, had pleaded his innocence.

The book detailed bizarre methods of killing. It said, for instance, that glue inside a custard pie thrown in the face of a target could block up the victim's nose and mouth and cause suffocation. Another method recommended in the 102-page manual was enveloping the person to be killed in a strong plastic bag.

Sydney - It's less than a year since Prime Minister Kevin Rudd brought Australia into line with most developed countries and signed the UN's Kyoto Protocol on curbing the greenhouse gas emissions causing climate change.

The Labor Party leader, fresh from his November electoral triumph over John Howard's conservatives, ratified the treaty and joined European leaders in promising to reduce carbon emissions by 60 per cent by 2050. He gave himself 12 months to set an interim target for 2020.

Sydney- Senior scientists on Tuesday lambasted Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's top climate-change adviser for recommending only a 10-per-cent cut in Australia's greenhouse gas emissions by 2020.

In an interim report delivered last week, economist Ross Garnaut said even his 10-per-cent cut should be conditional on a global deal committing all other countries to join in setting targets for reducing emissions.

Sydney - Australian soldiers who helped bring freedom to East Timor in 1999 also brought with them the cane toads that now plague the former Indonesian province, aid officials charged Tuesday.

"We don't know how to get them away, how to kill them," a Care International spokesman in Dili told Australia's ABC Radio.

"They should have thought about that," Simplicio Barbosa said, blaming the Australian military for the infestation.

The toxic toads were introduced to Australia from Hawaii in 1935, in a catastrophic attempt eradicate beetles that were savaging the cane crop in Queensland. They may have crossed the Timor Sea in military equipment shipped from Darwin to Dili.

Sydney - Australian Muslims said Tuesday that racism was behind a Sydney council's decision to approve plans for a Catholic school and reject a proposal to build an Islamic school.

The building projects are in the Sydney suburb of Camden, where five months ago the local council received 3,500 complaints about a plan to build an Islamic school and had to hire security guards to ensure order at meetings where the project was discussed.

Sydney, Sept. 8 : Australian Federal Police Commissioner Mick Keelty was reportedly grilled for three-and-a-half-hours on Monday with regard to evidence connected to the bungled investigation of Indian doctor Mohamed Haneef.

As he left the hearing, Keelty told reporters only that he had "cooperated fully with the inquiry" by retired NSW Supreme Court judge John Clarke.

Dr Haneef was arrested by federal police at Brisbane Airport in July last year in relation to an attack by Islamist militants in Britain.

The investigation slowly unravelled and Dr Haneef was eventually released without charge.