The Rugby League is confident that Whitehaven will start next season, despite the winding-up order issued by HM Revenue and Customs this week.

Australian climate change activists yesterday closed down operations at the world's largest coal port after entering its three terminals and attaching themselves to loaders.

A comet is coming to sky near you, later this month.

In these days of fixed-term contracts, his situation is hardly unique, but few players' present and future will collide in more pressurised circumstances than for Brett Hodgson today.

A Russian circus touring Australia dropped an act in which a performer swallows a live fish then regurgitates it after complaints that it was in poor taste and inhumane.

Writing about books that were important to him, Patrick White once said that one seems to "go on living in them for ever, possibly because they give glimpses of a heartbreaking perfection one will never achieve". Such was the case when, as a young aspiring novelist, I first read 'Voss' 50 years ago and watched its pages open like a vast geological fissure in the domesticated landscape of English fiction. Not that the book is perfect – its scale is too grand for that – and its terrain is Australian not English. But just as that continent's early explorers found its native species so strange they hardly knew how to see them, so White'saccount of a venture to the deep interior of both land and soul speaks to dimensions of experience so rarely examined that he felt hardly anybody would "understand what I am on about".

Leeds have Rob Burrow back in their squad at Hull KR tomorrow night after a two-month absence with a knee injury.

Queensland took full advantage of New South Wales' disarray in the wake of the Andrew Johns affair by inflicting one of the heaviest defeats in State of Origin history. Mal Meninga's Maroons clinched a record fifth series in a row with a 34-6 victory in Brisbane yesterday – and it was the players insulted by Johns who did much of the damage.

Kevin Humphreys was the most powerful man in the world of rugby league for more than 10 years, an innovative Australian administrator who changed the face of the game but whose career ended in scandal and controversy.

New South Wales will go into tomorrow's State of Origin clash without the legendary Andrew Johns in their corner, following his resignation from their coaching staff over a racial slur on Queensland's Greg Inglis.