Australia

Team USA (5-0) faces Australia (3-1) in the quarterfinals in the 2012 London Olympics beginning Wednesday at 2:15 p.m. PDT. Below are five things to watch. 1. Team USA should have an easy game against Australia. The stakes are higher because it's the medal round. But the reality still remains the same - there's absolutely no way Australia will come close to beating the U.S. The Aussies only feature one NBA player in Patty Mills, who's tied with Pau Gasol in the Olympics as the leading scorer (20.6)

Frank Eddy pulled off his dusty boots and slid into a chair, taking his place at the dining room table where most of the critical family issues are hashed out. Spreading hands as dry and cracked as the orchards he tends, the stout man his mates call Tank explained what damage a decade of drought has done . "Suicide is high. Depression is huge. Families are breaking up. It's devastation," he said, shaking his head. "I've got a neighbor in terrible trouble.

Nick Bonner has a cautionary tale about propaganda, censorship and North Korea. But it's not what you think, he says. The British filmmaker and art dealer had helped commission five North Korean painters to produce works for an Australian art exhibit, inviting them to come and talk about their craft and inspiration. This week brought a last-minute catch, a tableau where politics overshadowed art. But it didn't come from one of the world's most-repressed societies. Instead, Australia denied entry visas for the artists, calling their work a product of North Korea's propaganda machine.

The government has ordered an Iraqi diplomat who it believes is a spy to leave Australia by Wednesday, Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said Saturday. "We have reason to believe that he's associated with the Iraqi intelligence agency, and he is assessed by our agency as an Iraqi intelligence officer. His activities are incompatible with his status of a diplomat," Downer told reporters in Adelaide.

ChevronTexaco Corp., Royal Dutch/Shell Group and rivals are studying pumping natural gas across Australia through a pipeline costing more than $668 million to tap rising demand in the populous eastern states. Two trans-continental routes were being evaluated to ship gas as far as 2,486 miles from fields off northwestern Australia to cities such as Sydney, said Daniel Smith, a Western Australian government spokesman.

Members of an alleged Islamic terrorist cell in Sydney stockpiled bomb-making materials, trained at outback hunting camps and sized up Australia's only nuclear reactor as a possible target, according to a police report released Monday. In the 20-page glimpse into Australia's biggest terrorism investigation, police said the eight suspects arrested last week had the know-how and were assembling chemicals, detonators, digital timers and batteries to carry out a major bomb attack.

Participation of this country in a war with Iraq is growing "more likely," Prime Minister John Howard said today after a telephone briefing from President Bush on Sunday's summit in the Azores. At a news conference in Canberra, the capital, Howard said Bush did not make a "formal request" to Australia to participate in military action. "But I would expect ... that that request would be received in the very near future," he added.

The Australian government Thursday branded multilateral forums such as the United Nations "ineffective and unfocused" and said its foreign policy will increasingly rely on "coalitions of the willing" such as the one that waged war in Iraq. Foreign Minister Alexander Downer also said that in Canberra's view, other nations' sovereignty was "not absolute."

Australia's defense minister sharply criticized Boeing Co., saying he's concerned about a delay as long as 18 months in the production of an early-warning surveillance plane. "We are very disappointed with Boeing's performance on this project," Brendan Nelson said during a Pentagon briefing. Nelson said he intended to make sure that Boeing delivered on its airborne early-warning and control system aircraft, which are based on the 737 frame. The contract is worth more than $2.5 billion.