Transport Minister Chris Bishop blames “a significant escalation in costs and little clear benefit” for calling it quits on a replacement.

🌏 Planet Rescue | 🕵️ Whistleblower Protection | 🔬 Innovation

Ben Stokes’s side had been more bullish than past teams to tour Australia, but history implies another belting is coming As an Australian, even one lacking in cricket parochialism, it’s flat to sit around the Perth CBD city centre on what should have been the third day of the opening Ashes Test but isn’t. In the same way that this city of heatwaves is now being combed by chilly winds and rain, the whole thing just feels wrong. Through years of buildup, the current England team has raised the possibility of being different to those that came before. For anyone who believed it, even a little, it seems as if we all got hoodwinked. In my cricket watching lifetime, English visits have been a procession of the abject. This is not to claim any personal influence, merely to give a temporal window. But the length to which this lifetime has now grown does take the observation beyond the trivial. In 1986-87, when Mike Gatting’s team won the series by the fourth Test, I was too much of an infant to notice. No one then could have predicted the disproportionate brutality of the decades to come. Continue reading...

In the coming weeks and months we will be restoring a number of key functions.