Financial planners will be able to break the financial advice law with impunity unless a client takes private action, the government says.

An explanatory memorandum tabled with the changes to Labor's Future of Financial Advice legislation says the Australian Securities and Investments Commission ''will not take enforcement action in relation to the specific FOFA provisions that the government is planning to repeal''.

The dramatic ongoing loss of Australian animal and plant species has prompted influential scientists to call on governments to start making tough decisions about which ones to save - and which species should be left to face extinction. 

The voice interception program, called MYSTIC, began in 2009. Its RETRO tool, short for “retrospective retrieval,” and related projects reached full capacity against the first target nation in 2011. Planning documents two years later anticipated similar operations elsewhere.

In the initial deployment, collection systems are recording “every single” conversation nationwide, storing billions of them in a 30-day rolling buffer that clears the oldest calls as new ones arrive, according to a classified summary.

Some twisted crap from the new Templeton Prize Winner:

Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull lost an internal battle with Prime Minister Tony Abbott over whether businessman Joseph Skrzynski should be appointed to a second term as SBS chairman.

Fairfax Media understands Mr Turnbull lobbied strongly for the investment banker - whose five-year term expires next Wednesday - to remain in the position but was overruled by the Prime Minister's office.

In a statement released on Monday, Mr Turnbull praised Mr Skrzynski as an "outstanding chairman" and said that "SBS is a stronger organisation for his leadership".

Male-dominated talkback radio schedules and Q&A panels aren't outliers in an otherwise gender-equal world - they're representative of how women are routinely sidelined in Australian society, writes Clementine Ford.

A French court has ordered a news website to withdraw recordings an adviser secretly took of ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy during his 2012 election campaign.

When it gets complicated and confusing, when you’re overwhelmed with too much information, changing daily; too many explanations, some contradictory … try putting it into some kind of context by stepping back and looking at the larger, long-term picture.

A talkback caller to the ABC's Radio National station who discussed class systems in Australia, and described himself as "Barnaby in New South Wales", has turned out to be Federal Agriculture Minister Barnaby Joyce.

The purpose of art is complex... Some people think it's to put pretty pictures on walls... or to glorify Stalin or the Duke of Wellington in oil...  Being an artist is a job using representative skills and value judgement of interpretation. Many skills are often needed to be good. Some of the value judgements may be right or wrong, deliberate or accidental. But a lot of art is designed to challenge long established perceived ideas, including the self-worth of itself.

Significant communication problems within domestic spy agency ASIO led to an alleged Egyptian terrorist being cleared for community detention, a report has found.