Australia

Sunday Night True story interviewed Brenton Tarrant's mother. Interviewer showed her the video clip of her son shooting worshippers and asked, “What did you hope what happen to him?”

“I know what he deserves… he deserves a death penalty” said the mother. “It hurts me to say that because he is a family… but for someone who has taken so many lives of other people, its only fair that he deserves the same thing” she added.

A "very destructive" category 4 cyclone slammed into Australia's remote northern coast on Saturday, while a second, equally powerful storm bore down on the country's west.

Cyclone Trevor, pushing a big storm tide and packing winds of up to 250 kilometres per hour (150 mph), made landfall on the sparsely populated Northern Territory coast near the Gulf of Carpentaria town of Port McArthur, the Bureau of Meteorology reported.

MOSCOW, March 18. /TASS/. The Australian authorities have said they are taking financial sanctions and entry restrictions against seven Russians over the Kerch Strait incident, as follows from a statement by Australia’s Foreign Minister Marise Payne published on the Foreign Ministry’s website.

CANBERRA, March 18 (Xinhua) -- Australia's Opposition Leader has backed calls for the creation of a national database of hate crimes following the attacks in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Bill Shorten, leader of the Australian Labor Party (ALP), told Fairfax Media that the proposal makes perfect sense, saying that hate crimes were often a stepping stone to attacks like that which rocked New Zealand on Friday.

16 Mar 2019; DW: Australia's government plans to censure a far-right senator who claimed Muslim immigration was to blame for the New Zealand mosque attacks. The Islamophobic comments also caught the attention of a teenager with an egg.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced Saturday that the government would censure Senator Fraser Anning over his "appalling" comments about the mosque shootings in southern New Zealand.

Senator Fraser Anning from Queensland, Australia, has caused widespread outrage after releasing a statement on the New Zealand Mosques killings that resulted 49 deaths so far.

Anning’s statement has been slammed as “disgusting”, “reprehensible”, and an attempt at “blaming the victims”. Another Australian politician, Martin Pakula, slammed Fraser Anning as “human garbage”.

12 Mar 2019; DW: Austria's conservative chancellor Sebastian Kurz on Tuesday responded to French President Emmanuel Macron's ambitious vision on the future of Europe, saying some of the proposals could even be "dangerous." 

Macron's statement, which was published last Tuesday in major newspapers in every EU country, criticized populism while outlining a vision for EU social and regulatory reforms.

13 Mar 2019; DW: Disgraced Cardinal George Pell on Wednesday was sentenced to six years in an Australian prison for child sex crimes.

Pell, who once helped elect popes and ran the Vatican's finances, was convicted in December of molesting two choirboys at St. Patrick's Cathedral in Melbourne in the 1990s. A court order suppressing media coverage wasn't lifted until last month. 

SYDNEY, March 13 (Xinhua) -- Virgin Australia have assured the public that they will not introduce any new aircraft to their fleet unless completely satisfied with its safety, the airline said on Wednesday.

The statement came after Sunday's Ethiopian Airlines crash which killed all 157 people on board.

Just five months prior, another Boeing 737 MAX 8 operated by Lion Air also went down in Indonesia, killing 189 people.

Australia has suspended all flights into or out of the country by Boeing 737 Max aircraft, the type that was involved in Sunday’s Ethiopian Airlines crash.

Australia’s Civil Aviation Safety Authority says no Australian airlines operate the aircraft type, but two foreign airlines — SilkAir and Fiji Airways — fly them to Australia.

It says Singapore-based SilkAir has already suspended operation of its 737 Max aircraft.