A former Qantas cabin cleaner due to face a retrial over a do-it-yourself jihad manual was released on bail in Australia Thursday, walking free for the first time in almost three years.

Lebanese-born Belal Khazaal was bailed on strict conditions ahead of a November retrial for knowingly making a document connected with assistance in a terrorist act -- a charge on which he was convicted in September 2008.

The fossil of a car sized mega-wombat has been unearthed in northern Australia, scientists said Wednesday -- the most complete skeleton of its kind.

Weighing in at a whopping three tons, the herbivorous diprotodon was the largest marsupial to ever roam the earth and lived between two million and 50,000 years ago.

Australia's military conspired with U.S. guards to deny the Red Cross access to prisoners held at Iraq's notorious Abu Ghraib jail, including a high-value detainee, said documents published Tuesday.

Its officials also misled the public on the legality of interrogations, before prisoner abuse was exposed in photographs that shocked the world in May 2004, a year after the U.S.-led invasion, a Sydney-based legal lobby group said.

Australians, renowned for their sporting prowess in cricket and rugby, now want to win a world cup for running around on broomsticks -- otherwise known as Quidditch.

In J.K Rowling's hugely successful Harry Potter books and films, Quidditch is a semi-contact sport played by wizards and witches -- as popular in their world as football or cricket is in real life.

The neck bone of a crocodile-faced dinosaur species has been found in Australia, scientists said, showing the creature roamed much further than previously thought.

The vertebra of a Spinosaurus was found near southern Victoria's Cape Otway lighthouse and belonged to a relatively small two-meter (6.6-foot) beast which lived about 105 million years ago, said researcher Thomas Rich.

Ash from Chile's volcanic eruptions prompted Australian airlines to ground some domestic services and flights to New Zealand Sunday, stranding thousands of people after plumes drifted across the Pacific.

Strong winds have carried the ash clouds some 9,400 kilometers (5,800 miles) across the Pacific Ocean to New Zealand since Chile's Puyehue volcano erupted more than a week ago, and they are now entering Australian airspace.

Diseases that ravage wheat fields are as old as time itself. The ancient Romans even had a legend to explain the terrible plagues.

According to the myth, a mischievous young boy tied a flaming wheat straw to a fox's tail, torturing the animal. This single act angered the Roman god Robigus so much that he unleashed a rust-colored plague on the fields that turned all the crops to black.

Australia is considering awarding carbon credits for killing feral camels as a way to tackle climate change.

The suggestion is included in Canberra's "Carbon Farming Initiative", a consultation paper by the Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency, seen Thursday.

A Lebanese-born former Qantas cabin cleaner jailed in Australia for producing a do-it-yourself jihad manual Thursday had his conviction quashed by an appeals court and faces a re-trial.

Belal Khazaal was sentenced to a maximum 12 years in prison in September 2009 after a jury found him guilty of knowingly making a document connected with assistance in a terrorist act.

Safe sex advocates claimed a victory over Australia's Christian lobby Wednesday when their HIV campaign posters featuring two men hugging were reinstated at bus stops after an intense online backlash.

The black and white posters, in which one man has his arm draped across his partner's chest and is holding a condom, are part of the Queensland Association for Healthy Communities "Rip and Roll" campaign promoting condom use.