One of Australia's top police officers on Monday criticized violent video games that glorify rape and murder, after a spate of high-profile knifings by young people.

Andrew Scipione, the police commissioner for the state of New South Wales, said the violence adolescents were exposed to via films and console games only needed to affect a small minority of disturbed people.

Hundreds of people rallied in Australia on Sunday in support of the Syrian regime of President Bashar Assad, urging no intervention by foreign powers in the conflict.

Organized by a group calling itself "Hands off Syria", the demonstration began with a short rally of several hundred people at Sydney's town hall but numbers swelled as the group, many of them families, marched through the city.

Australia on Thursday urged the world "not to neglect" the conflict in Syria, where thousands have been killed and many more have fled to neighboring countries.

"We urge the world not to neglect this crisis even for a moment," Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr told a joint news conference with his Jordanian counterpart Nasser Judeh in Amman.

Australia has signed a nuclear supply treaty with the United Arab Emirates in a deal Foreign Minister Bob Carr said would see the Gulf state become Canberra's first Middle Eastern uranium customer.

Carr and UAE counterpart Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed al-Nahyam inked the deal in Abu Dhabi on Thursday, with the Australian minister describing it as a "step forward" for the Emirates' domestic nuclear power plans.

Australian police have seized half a billion dollars' worth of crystal methamphetamine and heroin after smashing a Hong Kong-linked international drugs syndicate, they said Tuesday.

Police raided addresses in Sydney on Monday, arresting seven people after allegedly finding 306 kilograms of crystal methamphetamine -- known as 'ice' -- and 252 kilograms of heroin worth a total of Aus$500 million (U.S. $525 million).

Syria has closed its embassy in Australia, officials said Monday, two months after Canberra expelled the country's top diplomat over one of the worst massacres of the more than year-long conflict.

"The Syrian Embassy in Canberra has closed," the mission said on its website.

Sri Lanka's navy arrested a boatload of people heading to Australia and raised the number of would-be illegal immigrants detained this month to a record 500, an official said Sunday.

A fishing trawler carrying 31 people was intercepted off the island's western coast on Saturday, and another 20 were arrested on shore ready to board the vessel, the navy official said.

Australian scientists said Wednesday cavers had stumbled upon a vast network of tunnels containing fossils that could offer key insights into species' adaptation to climate change.

The limestone caves in Australia's far north contained what University of Queensland paleontologist Gilbert Price described as a "fossil goldmine" of species ranging from minute rodents and frogs to giant kangaroos.

The sleepy South African town of Carnarvon has more churches than ATMs, but science is breathing new life into the far-flung farming center.

The former 19th-century mission station is the closest town to a science and astronomy hub that is forming in the arid central Karoo region where the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) mega-telescope will be built.

Australia's mining boom will slow more sharply than expected and could be over within two years due to easing demand from China and falling prices, a leading economic forecaster warned Monday.

Mining exports to industrializing Asian nations, chiefly China, helped Australia weather the global crisis without entering recession and prompted Canberra to vow a budget surplus for the 2012-13 fiscal year starting July 1.