Sydney  - Interest rates in Australia were unchanged at 3.25 per cent Tuesday after the central bank decided further relaxing monetary policy would increase inflationary pressures.

It was the first monthly meeting in five months that ended with the board of the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) not cutting the rate it charges banks for borrowing.

Sydney  - The sole remaining survivor among a pod of 192 pilot whales that came ashore on Tasmania's King Island still has a chance of joining the more than 50 already returned to the sea, Australian officials said Tuesday.

Five bottlenose dolphins that also beached Sunday at Naracoopa were coaxed or dragged by boat back out to sea, Tasmania's Parks and Wildlife Service spokesman Chris Arthur said.

Sydney  - Australian stocks followed W

Sydney, Mar. 2 : If video technology is used, it shouldn''t be dependent on cricket''s version of phone-a-friend. If an umpire has messed up so badly the video definitely proves him wrong, his assistant should get in his ear and say sorry, old boy, but that was out. If a decision is wrong, it''s wrong, regardless of anyone protesting, says cricket columnist Peter Roebuck.

In an article for the Sydney Morning Herald, Roebuck is all in favour of bringing back glorious human error to the game of cricket.

Sydney - A cinema chain was Monday accused of censorship for refusing to show a locally made feature film about ethnic tensions between Arabs and white Australians.

Greater Union stopped showing the film about Sydney's Lebanese-Australian enclaves after fights broke out following a screening in Sydney at the weekend, saying it had to "err on the side of the safety of staff and patrons."

Allanah Zitserman, the distributor of The Combination, said Greater Union was practising censorship.

Sydney, March 2 : An Australian computer scientist has developed the world''s first shoe phone, and has even published detailed step-by-step instructions online.

According to a report in the Sydney Morning Herald, Paul Gardner-Stephen, the inventor, insists there are practical applications of this phone, including, helping the elderly.

Gardner-Stephen, a post-doctoral fellow in bioinformatics at Adelaide''s Flinders University, made the gadget as a prop for a church camp drama presentation that had a "Get Smart" theme.

But after scouring the web and discovering that no one had created a shoe phone that was fully functional as a phone and could also be worn as a shoe, Gardner-Stephen set himself the challenge.