MELBOURNE, Australia — Months after a former Australian government employee said she had been raped in Parliament House, the police announced on Friday that they intended to charge a man with sexual assault in the case. The former government employee, Brittany Higgins, 26, sent shock waves through the country when she said earlier this year that she had been attacked […]

MELBOURNE, Australia — Months after a former Australian government employee said she had been raped in Parliament House, the police announced on Friday that they intended to charge a man with sexual assault in the case. The former government employee, Brittany Higgins, 26, sent shock waves through the country when she said earlier this year that she had been attacked […]

The Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australia bureau. Sign up to get it by email. The creature has the pointed beak and fin of a dolphin but the sagging jowls and stomach of someone getting on in years. Straggly blonde hair trails out of its blowhole and down to its dorsal fin. Its fleshy body is mottled […]

By Yan Zhuang A rift has emerged between Australia’s federal government, state leaders and medical groups over vaccination advice, with several officials issuing public objections to Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s decision to make the AstraZeneca vaccine available to those under 40. Australia’s vaccine advisory body has recommended that people under 60 should be vaccinated with the Pfizer shot because the […]

The Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australia bureau. Sign up to get it by email. The past few weeks has found me either wrapped in thermals and a blanket or working from my bed with my laptop balanced on my lap because it’s really cold in my apartment. It’s not so much a new realization as it […]

More than two centuries after his ancestor was cast out of Cornwall for stealing and sent to Australia with hundreds of other convicts, Scott Morrison returned to the area on Friday as prime minister of Australia. “It’s a long time since one of my family was in Cornwall,” Mr. Morrison said in a speech in Perth on Wednesday before traveling […]

The Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australia bureau. Sign up to get it by email. For the past two weeks, I’ve been trying to nudge my parents into getting the vaccine. They’ve been eligible since the beginning of May and can book an appointment through their G.P. whenever they want. They’re going to get it. They’ve just […]

MELBOURNE, Australia — The devices, procured on the black market, performed only a single function hidden behind a calculator app: sending encrypted messages and photos. For years, organized crime figures around the globe relied on the devices to orchestrate international drug shipments, coordinate arms and explosives trafficking, and discuss contract killings, law enforcement officials said. Users trusted the devices’ security […]

The state of Victoria, Australia, announced a seven-day lockdown beginning Thursday night to stem a coronavirus outbreak in the northern suburbs of Melbourne, the country’s second-most populous city, after Sydney. After nearly three months without a new infection, state health officials have detected 26 cases in the Melbourne-area cluster. The outbreak is believed to have begun when a man became […]

No one knows how the so-called Somerton man, found well-dressed and dead with a half-smoked cigarette on his lapel, wound up on the beach in South Australia where he was found. No one knows what he was doing there, or even how he died. This week, after he had spent decades puzzling investigators in Australia and amateur sleuths around the […]