Australia's central bank held its cash rate steady at a record low of 2.50 percent Tuesday and hinted at a prolonged pause, saying a period of interest rate stability was prudent as the mining boom unwinds.

Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) governor Glenn Stevens said the board had decided to leave interest rates on hold for a fifth consecutive month, as expected by analysts.

Queen Elizabeth II and her husband Prince Philip will make a state visit to France to mark the 70th anniversary of the Normandy landings, Buckingham Palace confirmed Monday.

The royal couple have heavily reduced their overseas travel and the trip in June will be the first time that the 87-year-old monarch has left Britain since visiting Australia in October 2011.

Australia's human rights watchdog launched an inquiry Monday into the detention of children under punitive government policies banishing asylum-seekers who arrive by boat to remote Pacific camps.

Gillian Triggs, president of the Australian Human Rights Commission, said the probe would examine the impact of mandatory detention on more than 1,000 asylum-seeker children being held in immigration facilities in Australia and the more than 100 on far-flung Nauru.

Australia on Friday denied fresh claims of asylum-seeker abuse by its navy as "completely unsubstantiated" while confirming for the first time that it was turning boats back to Indonesia.

Immigration Minister Scott Morrison broke with months of secrecy over the government's military-led Operation Sovereign Borders people-smuggling crackdown to concede that boats were being turned around.

An Indonesian court Tuesday jailed a people-smuggler for seven years after he arranged an asylum boat voyage to Australia which ended when the vessel sank with the loss of some 90 lives.

Javaid Mahmood, a 54-year-old Pakistani who organised the voyage which was supposed to take asylum-seekers from Indonesia to Australia in June 2012, was found guilty of people-smuggling.

Children were sodomized with a garden hose, locked in outdoor cages and savagely beaten by Salvation Army majors in graphic cases of abuse detailed Tuesday to an Australian inquiry.

A Royal Commission into child sexual abuse in Australia began hearing evidence into allegations of abuse at four Salvation Army homes for children between 1966 and 1977, which counsel assisting the inquiry Simeon Beckett warned would be "shocking to many".

The conflict in Syria poses new risks of homegrown extremism in Australia, with citizens returning radicalized after fighting there, the government warned Tuesday.

Attorney General George Brandis said the civil war which has left more than 130,000 dead and forced millions from their homes presented a "complex set of global security challenges" that extend far beyond the Syrian border.

Russia on Monday imposed a ban on Australian beef byproducts such as offal over the use of a growth stimulant allowed in some nations but that Moscow considers unsafe.

The temporary restrictions also affect Belarus and Kazakhstan -- two ex-Soviet nations that are part of a Moscow-led Customs Union.

Australia said Friday that asylum-seeker arrivals had dropped to their lowest level in almost five years and there would be no "stepping back" from its hardline policy, despite tensions with Jakarta.

Canberra's military-run Operation Sovereign Borders policy, which sees asylum-seeker boats turned back when it is safe to do so, has angered Indonesia due to several incursions, despite an official apology.

A proposal by Niue Premier Toke Talagi for his small Pacific nation to house asylum-seekers to Australia has been rejected by the Niuean parliament.

About 1,700 asylum-seekers who took people-smuggling boats to Australia are being held in camps on Papua New Guinea and the Pacific island of Nauru under a deal with Canberra.