Sydney - Another day, another safety scare for Australia's Qantas Airways Ltd.

Engineers at Singapore's Changi Airport discovered a body panel had fallen off a Qantas jumbo flying between Melbourne and the island republic, a spokeswoman said Friday.

"It had absolutely no flight safety implications," the spokeswoman said.

But there were implications for the passengers from Wednesday's mishap: a six-hour delay before the flight proceeded to London.

Sydney - The wine snobs who said Australians would never forsake bottles with corks for screw-topped ones have been proved wrong.

More than 70 per cent of this year's vintage will go on sale in bottles with metal caps. In fact, corks are now most prevalent in the cheap end of the market rather than in top-shelf wines.

To blunt the shift to metal, Portugal's Amorim has gone on the offensive, saying corks are the more environmentally sound solution because screw tops require four times more greenhouse gases to produce than corks do.

The world's largest producer of corks has a million-dollar advertising campaign running that tugs at the heartstrings of Australian drinkers.

Sydney, Aug. 8 : Police in New South Wales have extradited a man from Sydney to Melbourne today after he was charged with involvement in what federal police are calling a world-record importation of ecstasy.

Severico Domenicio Zirilli, 51, was arrested in Sydney this morning and charged over the importation of 4.4 tonnes - 15 million pills - of ecstasy in June last year. The consignment is said to be worth 440 million dollars.

Sydney, August 7 : A new research at the University of Queensland (UQ) in Australia is using genetics to explore the chicken genome to help understand the spread of chickens and people around the globe.

According to a report in the Sydney Morning Herald, the team from UQ has even challenged claims for the presence of chickens in South America before Christopher Columbus’ arrival in the 15th century.

Archaeologist Dr Sean Ulm, from UQ’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies Unit, said that it was known European chickens were introduced into the American continents by the Spanish after their arrival in the 15th century, but there was ongoing debate about the presence of pre-Columbian chickens in South America.

Sydney - It's not surprising that Lebanon-born Keysar Trad has nine children.

His homeland abounds with big families and he simply brought that tradition to Australia with him.

By the same measure, immigrants from China, where the one-child family is the norm, often stick with that paradigm in their new country - even though there is no state apparatus enforcing it.

"It seems that they genuinely prefer it," said Macquarie University demographer Nick Parr.

Sydney  - Zimbabwe's president Robert Mugabe will not attend the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics because he was told by China's Communist Party to stay away, the Sydney Morning Herald daily reported on Tuesday.

Citing sources, the paper said that "high-powered lobbying from political leaders who will be attending the ceremony prompted the highest levels of the Chinese Government to convince him not to attend."