A jealous Briton who killed a teenager and her parents after she spurned his advances was jailed in Australia today for at least 35 years.

The trading giant Glencore yesterday strengthened its grip on the world's most vital commodities by striking a deal to buy the biggest grain business in one of the world's biggest wheat exporters, Canada, for C$6.1bn (£3.9bn).

Ian Thorpe's hopes of competing at a third Olympic Games are on the line this week at Australia's national swimming trials in Adelaide, where a number of local rivals are aiming to crush the five-times gold medallist's London dreams.

Ricky Ponting has retired from one-day international cricket but will continue to play Test matches for Australia.

Australia's Eyre Peninsula is a harsh, empty place. Yet it's soul stilling in its beauty

Starring: Lucas Pittaway, Daniel Henshall, Louise Harris

A prominent Australian journalist is believed to be among three people killed in a helicopter crash.

In a wine connoisseur's worst nightmare, a container of Australian Shiraz that retails at £125 a bottle was smashed when a malfunctioning forklift dropped 462 cases of the precious red.

The main conclusion of a week of judging 1,000 Australian wines at this year's Decanter World Wine Awards – black teeth apart – was the extent to which the regions are coming into focus as champions of specific wine styles.

It's primary school stuff: mammals give birth to babies; birds lay eggs. Except that this particular mammal – also known as the spiny anteater – lays a big, rubbery whopper. Clearly it had its head in an ant hill when the rules were read out. Or perhaps, like many Australian creatures, it was simply being perverse.

Sarah Vine – Times columnist, domestic goddess and wife of the Education Secretary, Michael Gove – is, as her readers will be aware, a keen baker. Last week, I'm very reliably informed, she produced a particularly large batch of flapjacks and, unable to feed them to her family fast enough, gave them to her husband as a treat for his hungry cabinet colleagues. Pickles, Clarke et al, she surely concluded, are classic flapjack-lovers. Gove dutifully transported the tasty snacks to Downing Street in a Tupperware container. On his way to the Cabinet Room, however, he was detained by that day's security detail, who informed him, in no uncertain terms, that the Tupperware – not to mention the flapjacks within – was a security risk, and would have to stay with them. So Gove went to Cabinet empty-handed, and Ken Clarke's tea went unaccompanied. But who, we might well ask, ate all the flapjacks?

Police say a diver has been killed by two great white sharks off the south Australian coast.

Mark Cavendish's miserable Tour Down Under continued today after Australian police mistakenly reopened the route to traffic before he had finished stage three of the race.