Cutting benefit costs a tough task, but there are avoidable mistakes.

The death of a Gold Coast police officer has left Australians struggling how to deal with crime.

The high profile coverage of Countdown's withdrawal from the Red Cross breakfast programme is a public relations nightmare.

When you have children, your whole life changes and you must try to defend your child from harm no matter what.

Every grandparent will know the electric charge that four of us experienced for the first time last Saturday.

Countdown has stopped funding breakfasts for children at 61 low-income schools.

Think of preventive health care as the condom that most governments don't want to wear.

When Confederate forces fired the first shots at Fort Sumter on April 12, 150 years ago, triggering the American Civil War, almost four million African Americans were slaves.

A foreign security presence may need to remain in East Timor and the Solomons for longer than expected.

Commitment and some sacrifices only way to fix growing social and economic problems.

Welfare agencies alarmed at extreme lengths some people go to just to eat. One desperate case of a Bay of Plenty child and his three siblings has been offered as a stark example of the degree of poverty in our communities.

The Government won't consider reductions to main benefit levels including the sickness, invalid's, unemployment and domestic purposes benefits as part of any welfare overhaul recommended by the Welfare Working Group tomorrow.

About 300,000 welfare beneficiaries who are judged capable of work will face a day of reckoning tomorrow with the release of a report.