Archive for the ‘United Nations’ Category
Friday, May 7th, 2010
7/5/10
It takes a brave man to stand up to Iran’s state media and tell them to stop broadcasting his songs. But Mohammad Reza Shajarian – Iran’s beloved and acclaimed Persian classical musician – did just that following last year’s disputed presidential elections. After President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was re-elected amid allegations of voting fraud, he referred to protesters as ”dust and dirt”. Shajarian then described himself as the voice of dust and dirt, and declared he would not allow state-controlled radio and television to play his music. Eventually, they stopped. Ahmadinejad was back in the spotlight this week with his defiant address to the United Nations General Assembly in New York. His denials about the illicit nature of Iran’s nuclear ambitions prompted a walkout by a number of delegates, including the US representative. Iran matters hugely to the future peace and stability of the world, yet here in Australia we know very little about this Muslim nation, which is why it’s worth listening to this 69-year-old Iranian musician, who is touring Australia for the first time. He offers a timely and revealing insight into the thinking of Iran’s population
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Tags: Arms, Iran, UN, USA
Posted in Arms, Asia, Human Rights, United Nations, USA | No Comments »
Friday, May 7th, 2010
Jason Om; 7/5/10
A new study ranks Australia among the top 10 worst environmental offenders in the world. Researchers from Australia and overseas have sized up more than 150 countries on land clearing, carbon emissions and species loss. They say the findings dispel the view that poorer countries are mainly to blame for trashing the environment. The study aimed to take a big-picture look at how humans are changing the natural environment around them. Researchers from the University of Adelaide, the National University of Singapore and Princeton University pulled together figures from various sources, including the United Nations.
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Tags: Australia, Environment, UN
Posted in Australia, Environment, United Nations | No Comments »
Saturday, May 1st, 2010
Mark Dodd; 1/5/10
The UN should accept that conflicts today are not about gaining territory but protecting civilians. Angered by the rising civilian death toll in Afghanistan, Stanley McChrystal, the blunt-speaking US general in charge of the war, warned his commanders the conflict would not be won by the number of enemy combatants killed but by the number of Afghan civilians shielded from violence. Militaries, including Australia’s, disguise the killing of civilians with weasel word descriptions such as the odious “collateral damage”. Modern armies are increasingly aware that high civilian death tolls lose wars. In June last year, McChrystal said the problem was getting so serious that rules of engagement might have to be changed, including limits on the use of air strikes, too often a first response by jittery NATO troops under insurgent attack.
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Tags: Australia, Terrorism, UN, USA
Posted in Australia, Terrorism, United Nations, USA | No Comments »
Saturday, May 1st, 2010
Mark Dodd; 1/5/10
The UN should accept that conflicts today are not about gaining territory but protecting civilians. Angered by the rising civilian death toll in Afghanistan, Stanley McChrystal, the blunt-speaking US general in charge of the war, warned his commanders the conflict would not be won by the number of enemy combatants killed but by the number of Afghan civilians shielded from violence. Militaries, including Australia’s, disguise the killing of civilians with weasel word descriptions such as the odious “collateral damage”. Modern armies are increasingly aware that high civilian death tolls lose wars. In June last year, McChrystal said the problem was getting so serious that rules of engagement might have to be changed, including limits on the use of air strikes, too often a first response by jittery NATO troops under insurgent attack.
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Tags: Australia, Terrorism, UN, USA
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Thursday, April 29th, 2010
Amanda Hodge; 28/4/10; (4 Items)
Afghan refugees are returning in unexpectedly high numbers to their war-ravaged homeland, with more than 22,000 fleeing Pakistan’s rising insurgency and employment squeeze for an uncertain future across the border in the past month. Close to 1000 Afghans a day have filed through the UNHCR’s two reprocessing centres – in the restive Pakistani cities of Peshawar and Quetta – since the UN refugee agency reopened its voluntary repatriation program late last month. The latest figures come just a fortnight after the Australian government announced it was suspending all Afghan and Sri Lankan refugee visa applications to try to dissuade a growing number of asylum-seekers arriving by boat. That decision is unlikely to have been a motivating factor for the thousands of families who have chosen to return to Afghanistan. The UNHCR said that, over the past month, returning refugees had cited rising living costs, fewer jobs and the difficult security situation in Pakistan as key reasons to go back to Afghanistan.
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Tags: Afghanistan, Australia, Migrants & Refugees, Sri Lanka, UN, USA
Posted in Afghanistan, Australia, Human Rights, Refugee & Migrant, Sri Lanka, United Nations, USA | No Comments »
Saturday, April 17th, 2010
Yuko Naurushima; 17/4/10
A veiled woman cradling a baby girl was the first asylum seeker helped off a fishing boat yesterday, caught sailing to Christmas Island despite the government’s hardened immigration policies. She was among 82 asylum seekers, believed to be Iraqi, spotted close to the island late on Thursday and trailed by a navy ship into Flying Fish Cove just as the sun was rising over the island. Another boat of intercepted asylum seekers is expected today, holding the first people to be directly hit by the Rudd government’s suspension of processing for Sri Lankans and Afghans for between three and six months.
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Tags: Australia, Indonesia, Migrants & Refugees, UN
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Tuesday, April 13th, 2010
Damien Kingsbury; 13/4/10
Imagine, if you can, that you have spent the past 30 or more years in an environment of war, where your security is at best not guaranteed and at worst you and your loved ones have been regularly exposed to physical attack. Some, or many, people you have known and loved have been killed and many more bear the physical scars of war. Everyone bears its psychological scars. You are at best a political outcast and at worst vulnerable to repression, physical abuse, or worse. You or your sons or daughters flee your once loved home, seeking respite, hoping you can find safety and acceptance elsewhere. This is the situation facing Sri Lanka’s Tamils and many Afghanis, who in desperation seek refuge in one of the countries lucky enough to be able to offer it. What they find, however, is that they are treated as criminals.
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Tags: Australia, Migrants & Refugees, UN
Posted in Australia, Refugee & Migrant, United Nations | No Comments »
Tuesday, March 30th, 2010
Abraham Rabinovich; 30/3/10; (2 Items)
Israeli officials fear that the US government, in a radical shift of policy, is planning to impose a permanent peace settlement on Israel and the Palestinians within the next two years. The public snub of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during his visit to the White House last week is seen in Jerusalem as a shot across the bow as President Barack Obama’s administration gears up for a head-on confrontation with Israel over the long-stalled peace process. The Haaretz newspaper reported yesterday that Mr Obama and his aides made 10 demands of Israel during Mr Netanyahu’s visit that reveal Washington’s intention to move off the sidelines and become an active player. Several of the demands focus on neutralising the free hand Israel has permitted itself in East Jerusalem since annexing it in 1967. Israel is reportedly being asked to halt all construction in Israeli neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem. This includes the neighbourhood of Ramat Shlomo, whose planned expansion by 1600 housing units, announced on the day of US Vice-President Joe Biden’s arrival in Israel, touched off the current crisis.
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Tags: Israel, Settlers, Terrorism, UN, USA
Posted in Human Rights, Israel & Palestine, Terrorism, United Nations, USA | No Comments »
Friday, March 26th, 2010
Sherine Tadros; 26/3/10
When Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, arrived in Washington on an official visit and met with the US president, he received “the treatment reserved for the President of Equatorial Guinea”. Or so read the editorial pieces in some of Israel’s main newspapers. Israel feels humiliated after Netanyahu’s Washington adventure. They believe the Americans lured him in with a false sense of security, promises of solid (in fact “rock-solid”) bonds, messages communicated by top US officials that the crisis over illegal settlements in the West Bank is over – only for the Barack Obama himself to deliver the blow as soon as he got face time with the Israeli prime minister. And Netanyahu is bruised. Put aside the political jargon, there is no “golden way” forward. The US wants a stop to settlement building in East Jerusalem. But the Israelis will not comply – there are no compromises that can be made, only gestures to deflect attention away from the collision course the US and Israel are now on.
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Tags: Israel, Settlers, Terrorism, UN, USA
Posted in Human Rights, Israel & Palestine, Terrorism, United Nations, USA | No Comments »
Friday, March 26th, 2010
26/3/10
Trade interests have trumped conservation at a UN wildlife conference at which proposals to step up protection for polar bears, bluefin tuna, coral and several kinds of shark all failed, delegates said. Economic concerns hampered efforts to restrict trade in several commercially lucrative marine species at the 175-nation Convention on International trade in Endangered Species (Cites), which wrapped up a two-week meeting in Doha, Qatar, on Thursday. “As soon as big money gets involved, the ‘s’ of science is crossed out by two vertical stripes,” Willem Wijnstekers, the Cites secretary-general told reporters, meaning it becomes “$cience” spelt with a dollar sign.
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Tags: Environment, Trade, UN
Posted in Aid / Trade, Environment, United Nations | No Comments »
Friday, March 19th, 2010
Anne Chaon; 19/3/10
Lobbied aggressively by Japan, delegates at a UN wildlife trade meeting on Thursday massively rejected a ban on cross-border commerce in Atlantic bluefin tuna, a sushi mainstay. The controversial proposal was crushed with 68 votes against, 20 in favour and 30 abstentions at a meeting in Doha of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). To pass, the measure needed the support of two-thirds of the nations present. Industrial-scale harvesting on the high-seas has caused bluefin stocks to plummet by up to 80 percent in the Mediterranean and eastern Atlantic, the two regions that would have been affected by the ban.
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Tags: Environment, UN
Posted in Aid / Trade, Environment, United Nations | No Comments »
Monday, March 15th, 2010
Dennis Shanahan; 15/3/10
Diplomatic relations between Australia and Japan are spreading beyond the emotional issue of whale hunting in the Antarctic, as Japanese resentment grows at Kevin Rudd’s decision not to attend a nuclear disarmament meeting in Washington next month. Tokyo’s anger over the Rudd government’s renewed threat to take it to the International Court of Justice over whaling has fuelled disappointment at the Prime Minister’s shifting emphasis on nuclear non-proliferation. Last week, senior Japanese officials circulated an assessment of Japan-Australia relations after the first visit of new Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada, which praised progress on trade, defence, disaster relief and nuclear non-proliferation. But the assessment contained blunt views about the Australian government’s threat to take Japan to the ICJ and the refusal to cite the legal grounds for any action outside the International Whaling Commission talks. It also stressed the importance of continuing discussions on the nuclear issue.
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Tags: Arms, Australia, Japan, Nuclear, UN, USA
Posted in Arms, Environment, Japan, United Nations, USA | No Comments »
Monday, March 8th, 2010
Lucy Turnbull; 8/3/10
Australian women should never settle for anything less than full equality and equal pay for equal work. On International Women’s Day, we should also cast our minds to the unsatisfactory fact that there are not nearly enough senior women managers, chief executives or directors of our large corporations. But we should also look beyond our shores. All Australians should reflect on the lives of women who are permanently marked by deep and deepening tragedy and injustice – women such as Aung San Suu Kyi and countless thousands of Burmese women. For decades Suu Kyi, her Burmese sisters and ethnic minorities have undergone systematic cruelty – political persecution and imprisonment in her case, and in the case of her Burmese sisters, acts of criminal brutality: torture, rape, and displacement at the hands of the military dictatorship. There will be “elections” in Burma this year. But we should not be fooled into believing they will be free or fair.
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Tags: Burma, UN, Women
Posted in Burma, Human Rights, Terrorism, United Nations, Womens Rights | No Comments »
Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010
Robert Grenier; 2/3/10
In the various commentaries we have seen concerning the alleged Israeli assassination of Hamas operative Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, Israel’s Mossad is coming in for a great deal of criticism. How, it is asked, could the vaunted Israeli spy service have left behind so much evidence? Isn’t the point of such operations to “eliminate” an enemy without being detected? And when, according to this analysis, one factors in the ensuing political and diplomatic “firestorm” which is still gaining momentum, this Israeli operation – for such it certainly was – begins to look like a colossal blunder. I would suggest, however, that those making these criticisms are missing the point.
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Tags: Australia, Israel, Terrorism, UN, USA
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Monday, March 1st, 2010
1/3/10
It is wrong that no one has yet been held accountable for war crimes committed during the brutal fighting in Gaza in January 2009. During the three-week war that left more than 1,400 Palestinians and 11 Israelis dead, there were well-documented cases of Israel firing white-phosphorus shells and using vastly excessive force. For their part, the Israelis accused Hamas of targeting unarmed civilians with random shelling, for which the Palestinians need to hold their own enquiry. The alleged war crimes were the subject of a UN commission of inquiry by South African judge Richard Goldstone, which reported in November 2009. Goldstone asked both Israel and Palestine to hold independent enquiries and report back to the UN in three months. That deadline has just passed with no action taken.
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Tags: Israel, Terrorism, UN
Posted in Human Rights, Terrorism, United Nations | No Comments »
Monday, March 1st, 2010
Mark Dodd & John Lyons; 1/3/10; (3 Items)
Australia has abstained from a key UN vote supporting a war crimes probe of Israel’s military intervention into Gaza last year, three months after voting against the resolution. Foreign Minister Stephen Smith said yesterday the decision was unrelated to “recent events”, a reference to Canberra’s anger at Israel’s failure to explain the use of three Australian passports by suspects in the murder in Dubai of a senior Palestinian militant. Israel has neither confirmed nor denied the involvement of its spy agency Mossad in the killing of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, which Dubai police say involved 26 people travelling on false passports from four nations. However, Israel said last night it would provide whatever assistance was needed by any Australian investigation into the misuse of its passports, saying it was “a friendly country”.
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Tags: Australia, Hebron, Israel, Settlers, UN, USA, War Crimes
Posted in Australia, Human Rights, Israel & Palestine, Terrorism, United Nations, USA | No Comments »
