Robert Irwin comes to the rescue when an echidna waddles into a Sunshine Coast fruit shop and wedges itself under a fridge.

Snowtown "bodies-in-the-barrels" serial killer Robert Joe Wagner loses his bid for a non-parole period to be set, confirming the original judgment that he should never be released.

Robert Donohoe interviewed in Wagga Wagga by NSW Police detectives

An inquest into the disappearance of toddler William Tyrrell hears an SES volunteer who was involved in search efforts for the toddler on the NSW mid-north coast, did not respond to police questions.

The daughters of Kerry Robertson, 61, the first Victorian to use the state's Voluntary Assisted Dying Act, say their mother's death was "beautiful and peaceful".

A woman was allegedly raped so violently by a man she met in a shared laundry that she was lucky to survive, the ACT Supreme Court has heard. WARNING: This story contains graphic content.

After 25 years as a sniper in war zones, Robert later went on to photograph road fatalities. After being plagued by anxiety, depression and flashbacks, he has finally found peace with the power of painting.

Robert Glen Sirl was caught having sex with a 15-year-old girl in foster care when police visited to talk to him about a separate rape. He has now been found guilty of both crimes. WARNING: This story contains graphic content.

The team at Neville's Garden Site: Phil Creaser, Karen Roberts, Liz Price, Sue Hand, Kenny Travouillon, Dr Mike Archer, Arthur White, and John Scan

"The Hot Zone" author Richard Preston gets candid about a failed 1990s movie adaptation that was once set to star A-listers Robert Redford and Jodie Foster before falling apart.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is not going to sugarcoat it: He would love to see De Niro portray him in a movie about the coronavirus pandemic.

THE WAITING is over for voters in the marginal seat of Robertson, with Liberal MP Lucy Wicks claiming victory three days after election day, despite an evident swing to Labor.

(NY Supreme Court) - 2019–04234 Index No. 523834/18

(United States Seventh Circuit) - Affirmed. A company found, during a random audit by the Indiana Department of Insurance, to have committed hundreds of regulatory violations that entered into an agreement to pay a fine and relinquish its licenses could not subsequently sue the Department's commissioner alleging discrimination for their out-of-state residency without providing a valid reason to void the agreement.

(United States Ninth Circuit) - Affirmed. In this copyright law case, the 9th Circuit affirmed the district court’s grant of summary judgment in favor of the defendant. Plaintiffs, professional photographers, alleged that defendants removed copyright information metadata from their photographs in violation of 17 USC section 1202(b)(1)-(3). Section 1202 requires defendants to have known the prohibited act would induce, enable, facilitate or conceal infringement. Plaintiffs were unable to offer evidence to satisfy this requirement.

Touré Roberts talks about God covering your marriage.

See the private couple's adorable candid moments.

Chris Hedges speaks the truth about American politics while Robert Reich shows that he is still an establishment Democrat after all, like Bernie Sanders. Continue reading →

"Well, reducing the election to personalities is kind of infantile at this point. The fact is, we live in a system that Sheldon Wolin calls inverted totalitarianism. It’s a system where corporate power has seized all of the levers of control. There is no way to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs or ExxonMobil or Raytheon." Continue reading →

Movie star Robert Mitchum is best known for his many roles that combined allure and menace, in movies such as Cape Fear and The Night of the Hunter. Oh yeah, and for his rowdiness that included being fired from at least one movie and that memorable arrest for marijuana possession. But his life before Hollywood would make a good movie in itself. When Mitchum was only 14 years old, he was sent to live with his sister, but he didn't stay there long.

Mitchum (1917-97) left his sister’s home in New York. He hopped a freight to who knows where. Life was an adventure to be gained and this was how it would start. He rode flatbeds, freight cars, refrigerated trains, teeth-chattering, knees-kocking, met old timers who knew no other life and gave him advice on what to do, and who to avoid, how to steal food and clothes, hunt squirrel, panhandle, and keep clear of the law.

This was an education. This was the hobo life Mitchum had read about and long-wanted to follow. He felt at home among these outsiders, though some of them thought him no more than a tourist, a “scenery-bum”, just along for the ride. Near train stops and train yards, he’d find hobo hideouts and sit by fire light listening to stories told by world-worn travellers.

It didn't take much time before the young teen was arrested for vagrancy in Savannah, Georgia. He was put on a chain gang doing hard labor, and soon knew that his life was in danger if he didn't escape. Read the exciting story of Robert Mitchum's jailbreak at Flashbak. -via Strange Company

I'm away on holiday this week, so no regular Arsecast, but instead here's one that originally appeared on our Patreon feed. It's part of a series called The Players, and in this episode I chat to Philippe Auclair about Robert Pires, his career at Arsenal, favourite goals and moments, and much more. Enjoy.

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The L.A. Times have a new interview with Robert, and he gives them an update about the new album:

How far along are you on a new Cure album?
We’re going back in [the studio] three days after we get back from Pasadena for me to try and finish the vocals, which is, as ever, what’s holding up the album. I keep going back over and redoing them, which is silly. At some point, I have to say that’s it.

Has this been in the works for a long time or did you suddenly get to a point where it all came out at once?
I was offered the chance to curate the Meltdown Festival [in London] and I said yes. And then I realized I didn’t really listen to very much new music anymore. So I threw myself headlong into it and started listening to bands again and meeting kids who were in bands, and something clicked inside my head: I want to do this again. It came as a bit of a shock to me, to be honest. No one really believed me until we started recording.

Is there anything from your history that you would compare this new album to?
It’s very much on the darker side of the spectrum. I lost my mother and my father and my brother recently, and obviously it had an effect on me. It’s not relentlessly doom and gloom. It has soundscapes on it, like “Disintegration,” I suppose. I was trying to create a big palette, a big wash of sound.

Do you have a title?
The working title was “Live From the Moon,” because I was enthralled by the 50th anniversary of the Apollo landing in the summer. We had a big moon hanging in the studio and lunar-related stuff lying around. I’ve always been a stargazer.

In the past, when the Cure released an album, you’ve said the band was going to retire. How are you feeling this time?
Being the contrarian that I am, I’d be very unhappy if it was the last one. We’ll be onstage tomorrow and I’ll be saying to them, “This is the last time in Paris,” and they’ll look at me and shrug their shoulders. At some point, I will be proved right.

Read the rest at the L.A. Times.

https://t.co/BoAi0VA5gR

Robert Smith of The Cure's 'Schecter Signature UltraCure' Guitar, Played at Pasadena Daydream Festival on August 31st

Your bid supports: Free Arts For Abused Children, Mr. Holland's Opus Foundation, Little Kids Rock, Inner-City Arts, The Painted Turtle pic.twitter.com/skBiHZslmy

— The Cure (@thecure) August 29, 2019

Robert Smith is donating the guitar he will be playing this weekend at Pasadena Daydream Festival to be auctioned off to benefit @FreeArtsLA, @InnerCityArts, @littlekidsrock, @HollandsOpusFdn and @PaintedTurtleCA! ????

bid here????https://t.co/eZ9QdO3lgt

— goldenvoice (@goldenvoice) August 27, 2019

“Squinting bishop” sounds like a sort of cheese, but that’s Stinking Bishop, right? Which is also the name of a kind of pear.

There is a Cornish cheese called Yarg that is wrapped in nettle leaves. “Yarg” tended to be the sound a minor character made when being obliterated in the Transformers comics of my childhood.

President and CEO of the World Wildlife Fund, Carter Roberts, appears on the “All for Earth” podcast to discuss his organization’s global and multi-dimensional work to protect all aspects of the environment.

Annalena Baerbock und Robert Habeck warnen vor einem gesellschaftlichen Rückschritt infolge der Coronakrise. Was würden sie tun, wenn sie an der Macht wären?

This paper proposes a new methodology for estimating teacher value-added. Rather than imposing a normality assumption on unobserved teacher quality (as in the standard empirical Bayes approach), our nonparametric estimator permits the underlying distribution to be estimated directly and in a computationally feasible way. The resulting estimates fit the unobserved distribution very well regardless of the form it takes, as we show in Monte Carlo simulations. Implementing the nonparametric approach in practice using two separate large-scale administrative data sets, we find the estimated teacher value-added distributions depart from normality and differ from each other. To draw out the policy implications of our method, we first consider a widely-discussed policy to release teachers at the bottom of the value-added distribution, comparing predicted test score gains under our nonparametric approach with those using parametric empirical Bayes. Here the parametric method predicts similar policy gains in one data set while overestimating those in the other by a substantial margin. We also show the predicted gains from teacher retention policies can be underestimated significantly based on the parametric method. In general, the results highlight the benefit of our nonparametric empirical Bayes approach, given that the unobserved distribution of value-added is likely to be context-specific.

De Niro, 76, also voiced his support for Joe Biden as a presidential candidate on "The Late Show," and was critical of President Trump’s handling of the response to the COVID-19 outbreak.

This new entertainment series should get the motor running for movie and music fans.

Gov. Cuomo is down with Robert De Niro portraying him in a movie about the coronavirus pandemic, should there be one, and he also took a moment to play the role of the Manhattan-born actor.

Rangers managing director Stewart Robertson has been accused of making "baseless, damaging and self-serving attacks" by his fellow Scottish Professional Football League board members.