After Cyclone Pam caused widespread destruction on Vanuatu, a South Pacific archipelago, on March 14, Prime Minister Baldwin Lonsdale said the devastating cyclones increasingly hitting his nation were directly linked to climate change.
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I take issue with Ben Courtice鈥檚 and Emma Murphy鈥檚 criticism of my review of Bill Gammage鈥檚 book, The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia in the January 28 麻豆传媒 Weekly.
I have two major arguments with their criticism. First, Gammage has made a major contribution to our understanding of how Aboriginal Australians cared for the land for more than 60,000 years right across the continent.
US bars UN torture investigator from jails and Guantanamo
The United Nations special investigator on the use of torture criticised the US on March 11 for stalling for over two years in granting the international human rights body access to inmates at Guantanamo Bay and other federal US prisons.
Student activists dropped a huge banner from Sydney University鈥檚 Fisher Library which read "No cuts, no fees, no dereg. Fightback now!" to raise the alarm about the federal government鈥檚 looming attempt to deregulate university fees.
Six students also locked themselves to the Vice-Chancellor's office, to demonstrate their opposition, and called on all university Vice-Chancellors to oppose the bill.
Experience proves that left-wing movements can win government, but nevertheless not hold power. Democracy, in other words the exercise of power by the people and for the people, requires much more.
The problem is now being faced in Greece with with radical left party SYRIZA, which won elections in January. It will have to be faced in Spain if the new anti-austerity party Podemos wins November elections.
The following was released by Aid/Watch, an independent monitor of international aid and trade, on March 5.
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Australia spends $577 million a year on aid for Papua New Guinea (PNG). Two key focus areas are anti-corruption related 鈥 law and justice, and governance.
PNG has concurrently undertaken a number of national processes to combat corruption without Australian support.
US hemispheric policy reached a new low on March 9 when President Barack Obama invoked emergency powers to declare 鈥渁 national emergency with respect to the unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States posed by the situation in Venezuela.鈥
Thanks to Obama鈥檚 action, the US has now blatantly rehabilitated its traditional imperial posture towards the South and challenged the continent-wide Bolivarian cause of Latin American and Caribbean independence and sovereignty.
The recent 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz was a reminder of the great crime of fascism, whose Nazi iconography is embedded in our consciousness.
Fascism is preserved as history, as flickering footage of goose-stepping blackshirts, their criminality terrible and clear. Yet in the same liberal societies, whose war-making elites urge us never to forget, the accelerating danger of a modern kind of fascism is suppressed; for it is their fascism.
What does the victory of radical left party SYRIZA in Greece's January 25 elections mean for politics in Europe, at Europe-wide and national levels? Both levels are closely intertwined, and since SYRIZA鈥檚 win have been having rapid feedback effects on each another.
Across Europe, the reverberations of SYRIZA鈥檚 win are being felt with rising force, both in 鈥減eripheral鈥 Europe, but also in the German-led European Union 鈥渃ore鈥.
In much the same way that the Tony Abbott government鈥檚 attacks on Gillian Triggs deflected media attention away from the horrific substance of the Human Rights Commission鈥檚 report on children living in detention, his 鈥渓ifestyle choices鈥 comment this week ensured the media has paid little attention to the government鈥檚 cuts to Aboriginal services.
A largely unknown region to the rest of the world became one of the most talked about globally in recent months.
Kobane is a town that suffered a too-harsh fate. Innocent civilians never think that one day they would face massacres 鈥 except that being a Kurd in a town like Kobane (in a largely Kurdish area in the north-west of the Syrian state), means you face such things.
An Aboriginal encampment returned to Matagarup (also known as Heirisson Island) on March 1. Police moved in on March 13 to close it down but were unsuccessful.
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