A 73-YEAR-OLD man has died in a bungalow fire in central Victoria.
A woman in her late 50s who was unaccounted for when police and fire fighters discovered the body has been found and is uninjured.
Ambulance Victoria spokesman John Mullens said the house in Maintongoon, about 100km northeast of Melbourne, was well-alight by the time emergency services arrived shortly after 5.30pm (AEDT).
ETIHAD plans to increase its stake in Air Berlin to 49.9 per cent, German weekly WirtschaftsWoche reports.
The Abu Dhabi-based carrier already holds almost 30 per cent of the shares in Germany's second-biggest airline.
WirtschaftWoche reported on Saturday the plan would involve buying out small shareholders and delisting Air Berlin PLC from the London Stock Exchange.
Large shareholders including former managers and travel firm TUI would retain a majority.
The magazine cited sources at Air Berlin for its report.
The company, which on Wednesday postponed the release of its annual results until next week, declined to confirm the WirtschaftsWoche report.
Spokesman Mathias Radowksi says Air Berlin is "currently in advanced discussions on options, which, if implemented, would have a substantial effect of the company".
AN additional 270 truancy officers will be organising uniforms and packing lunch boxes in indigenous communities in a bid to get Aboriginal children back into schools following a boost in federal funding.
Forty remote communities already benefit from 400 truancy officers, at a cost of $28 million, who encourage school attendance by walking or driving children to school, helping with lunch preparation and organising uniforms.
The government on Saturday announced a boost in funding of $18 million to help a further 30 communities.
Since the remote school attendance strategy was announced at the end of last year, attendance rates are up 14 per cent in the Northern Territory, Western Australia and South Australia - equating to more than 600 additional students in school each day.
MORE than 5000 pro-Russia residents of a major city in Ukraine's east have demonstrated in favour of holding a referendum on whether to seek to split off and become part of Russia.
Saturday's rally in Donetsk came less than a week after the Ukrainian region of Crimea approved secession in a referendum regarded as illegitimate by the Western countries. After the referendum, Russia moved to formally annex Crimea.
With Crimea now effectively under the control of Russian forces, which ring Ukrainian military bases on the strategic Black Sea peninsula, concern is rising that Ukraine's eastern regions will agitate for a similar move.
Russia has brought large military contingents to areas near the border with eastern Ukraine. Russian President Vladimir Putin has said there is no intention to move into eastern Ukraine, but the prospect of violence between pro- and anti-secession groups in the east could be used as a pretext for sending in troops.
Eastern Ukraine is the heartland of Ukraine's economically vital heavy industry and mining and the support base for Viktor Yanukovych, the Ukrainian president who fled to Russia last month after being ousted in the wake of three months of protests in the capital, Kiev.
Russia and Yanukovych supporters contend Yanukovych's ouster was a coup and allege that the authorities who then came to power are nationalists who would oppress the east's large ethnic Russian population.
"They're trying to tear us away from Russia," said demonstrator Igor Shapoval, a 59-year-old businessman.
"But Donbass is ready to fight against this band which already lost Crimea and is losing in the east."
Donbass is the name for the region of factories and mines that includes Donetsk.
The demonstrators erected about several tents, an ironic echo of the massive tent camp that was established on Kiev's central square after the protests against Yanukovych broke out in late November.
The local parliament on Friday formed a working group to develop a referendum analogous to the one in Crimea.
FIVE people are dead after a light plane carrying a group of skydivers crashed and burst into flame at an airfield north of Brisbane as family members of those aboard watched in horror.
Witnesses said the Cessna 206 disintegrated in a fireball after coming down shortly after taking off from the Caboolture Airfield about 11.30am (AEST) on Saturday.
Police said there were five people on board and there were no survivors.
The names of the deceased have not yet been released, nor has that of the skydiving company involved.
A police spokeswoman said it was believed some of the families of those killed were at the airfield to watch the skydive.
It's understood two skydiving companies operate from Caboolture Airfield, which has been shut down by police.
Two investigators from the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) were travelling to Caboolture from Brisbane, and three more were due to arrive from Canberra later on Saturday.
An ATSB spokesman said they would examine the wreckage, interview witnesses and study the weather to find out what went wrong.
Airport safety officer Bryan Carpenter said he saw the crash, adding that the plane which was loaded with high-octane fuel, was destroyed by flames within a minute of impact.
He said the plane veered to the left after take-off, before plunging to the ground and bursting into flames.
It took firefighters 10 minutes to douse the inferno, with another witness saying the fire was out of control when he arrived on the scene.
"It was hard getting close. You can't put that type of fire out with hand-held extinguishers," Mark Thompson from the Caboolture Warplane Museum told AAP.
Both Mr Carpenter and Mr Thompson said it was the worst crash they'd seen at the airport.
"They've had a couple of incidents here but nothing like this," according to Mr Thompson, who ran about 200 metres to the scene after hearing a loud thud and seeing a plume of smoke.
Mr Carpenter, who has worked at Caboolture for 14 years, said the crash could have been caused by any number of things.
"One of the things one would expect would be an engine failure but the engine was delivering power on touch down," he told Fairfax Radio Network.
"So it's something mechanical I would say ... or the pilot could have blacked out - any number of scenarios; it's a bit like MH370 at the moment, we just don't know."
FOR an award-winning cake decorator who spends Monday to Friday surrounded by the temptations of her sugary creations, Jacquie Goldstaiz's palate is a blessing in disguise.
"I never bake for me. I just really love fresh fruit and vegetables," she said.
"The only time I really taste cake is to make sure it's the right flavour or it's not too dry."
Ms Goldstaiz's artistic flair earned her the championship title and a $2000 prize at the Australian Cake Decorating Championships in Sydney on Friday.
The Gold Coast woman's marzipan fruit creation took two months to make.
While the competition version was not edible, Ms Goldstaiz estimates a real cake would take two weeks to create and would weigh about 10 kilograms.
Throughout her five-year career, Ms Goldstaiz has created cakes in the shape of a Louis Vuitton bag, a Native American head and a diving helmet.
But somehow the former florist manages not to overindulge.
"To me, it's an art," she said.
"I never look at it as a cake and never look at it as something to eat."
Her winning confection will return to Queensland to take prime position in her cake-decorating shop.
Police are conducting raids on properties linked to the Comancheros outlaw bikie gang in Victoria. Source: AAP
THREE men have been charged and guns and drugs seized after raids on the Comanchero bikie gang across Melbourne.
Police searched a series of homes and businesses across the city on Friday morning, finding firearms at a property in Dewhurst.
Ammunition and drugs, believed to be steroids, were found in Lynbrook.
Three men were arrested and all charged with perverting the course of justice.
Robert Morando, 41, of Narre Warren South, Michael Murray, 36, of Lysterfield South and Almir Dzafic, 33, of Hampton Park, were remanded in custody to face Melbourne Magistrates Court on Monday.
Murray is also facing charges of possessing firearms, steroids and ammunition.
POLICE say 10 women drowned when a small boat loaded with farmworkers sank in a lake in western India.
Police officer Satyendera Singh says six women and a boatman were also rescued after the accident on Friday in Rajasthan's state Tonk district, nearly 390 kilometres southwest of New Delhi.
Singh said the small boat appeared to be overcrowded with women heading to a nearby village to work on farms.
Police have recovered all the bodies.
Boating accidents are common in India because many ferries are poorly built and are often overcrowded, and there is little regard for safety regulations.
RADAR images taken from planes or satellites could some day be used to predict where sinkholes might form - a potential boon for Florida, the sinkhole capital of the US.
The possibility of an early-warning system stems from new NASA research into a monstrous sinkhole that opened in Louisiana in 2012, forcing the evacuation of hundreds of residents.
Two NASA researchers examined radar images of the sinkhole area near Bayou Corne. Cathleen Jones and Ron Blom discovered that the ground near Bayou Corne began shifting at least a month before the sinkhole formed - as much as 10 inches (25.4 centimetres) towards where the sinkhole started. Since its formation, the sinkhole has expanded to 25 acres and is still growing.
The NASA findings raise the possibility that engineers eventually could develop a way to predict the location of sinkholes. It would require the constant collection and monitoring of the Earth's surface with radar data collected from planes or satellites.
"It's not a magic bullet," Blom said. But it could be "one more tool in a tool kit."
The radar images studied by the two NASA scientists were part of the agency's ongoing effort to monitor the Louisiana coast, which is rapidly sinking into the Gulf of Mexico. Although the Louisiana images were taken from a research jet, the scientists said a satellite with similar technology could do the same job.
And though such a system wouldn't be cheap - the price of building and launching a satellite usually is in the hundreds of millions of dollars - the gains could be significant. In Florida alone, sinkholes cause about that much property damage each year.
Although there are no recent state data on sinkhole damage, a 2010 report by the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation estimated that sinkholes each year cost the state $US200 million to $US400 million ($A221.69 million to $A443.39 million).
A BOSNIAN Serb war criminal has been brought to Poland to serve out his sentence after he was assaulted in a British prison, a justice official says.
Former general Radislav Krstic was convicted in 2001 and handed a 35-year prison sentence by the UN tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, Netherlands, for aiding and abetting genocide over the 1995 killing of some 8,000 Muslims in Srebrenica, Bosnia.
Bartlomiej Turbiarz, a spokesman for the local prison service, said on Friday that Krstic was brought to a specially guarded prison in Piotrkow Trybunalski, in central Poland, Thursday and was placed in a one-person cell that is monitored around the clock.
A Warsaw court has two months to rule how much longer, according to Poland's law, Krstic should serve, spokeswoman for the Justice Ministry, Patrycja Loose said. Poland's maximum prison term is 25 years.
Poland agreed to hold Krstic after he was attacked and injured by three Muslim inmates in Wakefield Prison, in northern England, in 2010.
Poland hasn't held a foreign war criminal since Nazi official Erich Koch, who died in Barczewo prison in 1986.
