Sydney - A temperate climate, no steep hills and few rainy days: despite ideal cycling conditions, residents of Sydney have an aversion to bicycles.

On a per capita basis, twice as many people in Melbourne cycle to work and four times as many in Canberra.

Sydney seems wilfully against pedal-power despite recent research showing that chronic congestion means cycling is usually quicker than the car, the bus or the train.

Christian Wolmar, a London-based transport planner, was invited to Sydney in August to analyse the city's cycling problems.

Sydney - Mortgage holders struggling to keep ownership of their houses after 13 consecutive interest-rate hikes can now bet on the outcome of the monthly meetings of the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA).

"After being inundated with requests in recent weeks, I welcome legislation which allows us to bet on something that's obviously so important to everyday Australians," Gerard Daffy, sports betting manager with agency Lasseters Sportsbook, said in a statement Wednesday.

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Sydney, August 21 : A study conducted by a prominent U. S. media watchdog, known as the Parents Television Council, has revealed that adultery, teen sex and lust are hot topics on prime-time TV.

The council said that it studied over 207 hours of scripted shows on the five main American broadcast networks, and found that spoken references to non-marital sex outnumbered mentions of marital intimacy by about three to one.

The ratio was four to one for scenes that visually depict or imply sex, said the council.

The study showed once-taboo topics like partner-swapping, threesomes, strippers and prostitution were increasingly becoming common these days.

Sydney  - Animal lovers Thursday rigged up a feeding device they say could keep a month-old humpback alive long enough for its mother to reclaim it from a sheltered Sydney bay where it has been trying to suck milk from the hulls of yachts.

But animal welfare officers have told them to leave the calf alone and let experts decide its fate.

The 5-metre calf somehow got separated from its mother last week and is growing weaker by the day.

Sydney - Connoisseurs, business rivals, xenophobes and marketing gurus lined up to stick the boot in Starbucks when the Seattle-based coffee chain declared in July that it was closing 61 of its 85 Australian outlets with the loss of almost 700 jobs.

The coffee snobs said that the locals didn't take to the sweet and watery offerings from Starbucks. They stayed with the European-style espressos brought to Australia generations ago by Italian migrants.

"Their coffee is more like a milkshake," scoffed coffee luminary Ron Basset. "We probably have three times the coffee in ours that they do."