The Real Australia

The first thing to mistrust, should you be an American thinking of going to Australia for the first time, is your idea of the place and its people. Probably you think the 2000 Sydney Olympics is a vastly important event for all of us, a huge national rite that will “put us on the map”–the same map, presumably, on which the last Australian Olympics, in Melbourne in 1956, failed to inscribe us.

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Crime-fighting leech cracks Australian cold case

If not for a lowly leech, Peter Alec Cannon might not be in the heap of trouble he’s in now. In what Australian officials are calling a first in their country — and possibly in the world — police used DNA extracted from a leech that bit Cannon eight years ago to convict him of robbing an elderly woman.

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