Judith Kerr

Illicit tobacconists are opening after hours and offering cigarette delivery services in a series of desperate attempts to avoid being raided by authorities.

Queensland’s 2025 NAPLAN results have shaken up Brisbane’s academic landscape, with several of the city’s most prestigious elite schools slipping sharply, and upstaged by their outer-metropolitan independent rivals.

Ages 0-5 Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are is redolent with a sense of darkness: Max, an imaginative boy, is sent to his room without his dinner after a tantrum. There, he sets out to the island ‘where the wild things are’, outsized and ferocious – but somehow comical – creatures that make Max their king. The smell of dinner abruptly returns Max to his bedroom, back to reality. Once banned by libraries, children loved it, while critics eventually understood it as an allegory of returning to the love of one’s family.

A major planning decision, quietly signed off by the state government this month, has cleared the way for high-rise towers of up to 15 storeys in a prestigious waterfront suburb on Brisbane’s bayside, triggering fresh fears the move will force rapid growth without the roads, transport, and services needed to cope.

The federal government has pushed back its decision on Redland City Council’s proposed Olympic whitewater centre at Birkdale, with the Environment Department still weighing up whether the project requires formal approval under national environmental law.

A quiet street in Logan became the focus of a police investigation overnight after gunshots were fired into a family home in the early hours of Sunday morning.

An overgrown vacant block on Russell Island has cost its owner more than $2800 after he refused a council clean-up order and took the matter to court — only to lose and incur fines and costs.

Fresh tensions have erupted in the escalating battle over koala habitat clearing at Ormiston College after graffiti appeared at the school days after the state government stepped in and approved a controversial school redevelopment expected to remove more than 650 trees.

A Queensland mum, who thought she was suffering from little more than stomach pain and bowel irritation, woke from what she expected would be a routine colonoscopy to discover doctors had found a tumour the size of a tennis ball growing inside her bowel.

Police have stepped up a search for a 49-year-old Coochiemudlo Island man who disappeared last week, after his boat was found partly submerged at Toondah Harbour on the weekend.