THINK we've got it bad - petrol price gouging may have hit a new high with UK motorists paying through the teeth as fuel supplies dwindle.

ALLCO Finance Group has sold its US wind project for $US325 million ($346 million), as part of a program to sell assets and use the proceeds to pay down debt.

WITH mortgage interest rates sitting at a 12-year high, investors are turning away from property as credit costs mount and some investors sell up.

A MAN stole two Bobcats for a Backyard Blitz-style makeover of his wife's housing commission home, which included a swimming pool for their children, the Supreme Court has heard.

THE agriculture sector will continue to be one of the stock market's strongest performers over the next year, according to the Commonwealth Bank.

DIFFICULTY securing finance for its $2 billion pulp mill has forced Gunns to seek extensions to wood-supply and sovereign-risk agreements.

AUSTRALIANS could be slapped with another interest rate rise if they push wage demands too far, risking an inflation blowout.

QANTAS will close a maintenance base and end services on some regional routes in a bid to save costs as the price of jet fuel surges as the airline's shares plunge.

THREE people who had been found guilty of the Salt nightclub murders in Melbourne in 2002 have had their convictions quashed.

AN inquest is examining why health authorities put two mental health patients into the same shared accommodation before one stabbed the other to death.

TWO Chinese nationals working under Federal Government 457 visas were forced to work with broken hands and arms on unsafe equipment at a printing company in the Melbourne suburb of Campbellfield, a court heard yesterday.

SWIMMER Nick D'Arcy's assault case is expected to be put off until after the Olympics because some defence witnesses are members of the Australian swim team.

LAWYERS for former terrorism suspect Mohamed Haneef have been given more than 250 immigration department documents but another 15 are being witheld.

A DISTRAUGHT Nick D'Arcy says he has accepted that he will not swim at the Beijing Olympics but admits it is "one of the harder things I've had to do".

STUDENT Angela Stankovic and her mother, Danijela, left their troubled homeland of Serbia seeking "a better life" in Australia.

THE potentially devastating crown of thorns starfish is in retreat on the Great Barrier Reef, with its numbers hitting a 20-year low, researchers say.

AUSTRALIAN scientists have created a home-grown vaccine for bird flu which will be available the moment a pandemic has been declared.

A MAN who raped two elderly women and exposed himself to scores of others has been jailed for 17 years.

AN oil sheik billionaire has started flying wild mares and stallions from remote WA to Dubai to create a "super breed of endurance racehorse.

WEST Australian Opposition Leader Troy Buswell says he's frustrated by challenges to his leadership while he is trying to hold the Government to account on the state's gas crisis.