Keywords: Usa
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- Frank Brennan
- 31 March 2015
10 Comments
Some of the Australian commentary on the Indonesian justice system has been understandably very critical. But living here in the USA for a year, I have come to realise that the death penalty infects every justice system no matter how good and robust it is. In the end, the death penalty is always political. That’s why I am very grateful to Pope John Paul II who changed his position.
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AUSTRALIA
- Kate Howarth
- 30 March 2015
12 Comments
I was sent to St Margaret's Home for Unwed Girls, and when I didn’t buckle to pressure to surrender my son for adoption, I was tossed onto the street. I went from rock bottom to rise to the top of my field, only to have everything pulled from underneath me. I managed to get back up again and realise my childhood dream of one day becoming a writer, lending a voice to tens of thousands of young women who lost their children in what is now known as 'forced adoption'.
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AUSTRALIA
- Michael Mullins
- 02 March 2015
10 Comments
The Prime Minister has been forced to announce a proposal to toughen food labelling laws after the recent outbreak of Hepatitis A was linked to 'Nannas' imported berries. This goes against his resolve to remove red tape that represents 'unnecessary' compliance costs for business. The government has fervently derided red tape and presented regulation as the enemy, without distinguishing between regulations that are redundant and those that are needed to protect the consumer.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Ellena Savage
- 20 February 2015
8 Comments
When Damo and Darren's 'Train Station' — Michael Cusack's animation of an obscene 'part derro, part yobbo, part bogan' duo fighting over a lighter — was published on YouTube, it clocked 2 million views in its first month, and made people very happy. I showed it to a friend who had grown up in England's north under Margaret Thatcher. He was not amused. 'Why are Australians laughing at poor people?' he asked.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- P.S. Cottier
- 10 February 2015
8 Comments
Subtle as a ventriloquist, he clacks and grins ... But the beer is flat and the snags, the snags are burning to memory. Someone should give him a lap. Someone please give him a gong.
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AUSTRALIA
- Pat Walsh
- 04 February 2015
17 Comments
The execution of Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran is expected to take place on Nusakembangan, a prison island off Central Java. Visitors there are greeted by a sign which translates: 'They are not criminals, just lost people, and it is never too late to repent'. To be executed after you repent, however, is certainly too late. It also diminishes Indonesia. But let’s not write Indonesia off.
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RELIGION
- Sally Cloke
- 12 December 2014
18 Comments
On Wednesday, 53 Christian protesters were arrested staging 'pray-in' actions at politicians' offices around the country. Eight were allegedly strip searched before being formally charged with trespass after praying in the Perth office of Foreign Minister Julie Bishop. There are echoes of martyrdom in the early church, which involved the refusal to worship the emperor. In contemporary Australia, the resistance is to the border protection regime.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Tim Kroenert
- 11 December 2014
During an end-of-season trip to Bangkok, impressionable country footy dork Ray is badgered by one of his teammates into turning drug mule. He is picked up in Melbourne, where a couple of nasty cops detain him under supervision for seven days, waiting for him to pass the heroin-filled balloons he ingested. Ray is beset on all sides by systemic corruption, which makes his refusal to poo — fuelled not by greed but by a kind of everyman nobility — seem truly heroic.
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AUSTRALIA
- Ellena Savage
- 31 October 2014
4 Comments
I take a lot of selfies. Some of them are silly, coquettish, dramatic. Others are just my face looking into my computer, sitting where I work, dressed in work clothes. They mean more or less nothing. They’re just an inane collection of data on my laptop, or too easy self-portraits. Nothing means nothing, but it says something about the culture.
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INTERNATIONAL
- Justin Glyn
- 28 October 2014
2 Comments
Syria and Ukraine are just the latest in the roll of civil wars where ossified Cold War rivalries exacerbate conflicts and prevent the forging of a just peace which is in all parties’ interests. Current insurgencies grew out of disenfranchisement. But the relevant powers have declined to involve United Nations to act as independent broker, knowing that each party has the support of a permanent member of the Security Council, whose veto will hamstring any proposed action by the others.
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AUSTRALIA
- Darrell Cruse
- 19 September 2014
15 Comments
More than forty thousand children are in out of home care in Australia. Yet with a drop in the number of available foster carers, there is a real danger foster care will be non-existent in five years, creating even more problems for already vulnerable children.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Anthony Morris
- 11 September 2014
As with her previous films, Kelly Reichardt is interested in people moving through and reacting to their landscape. In Night Moves, the drama comes from the way the characters' reaction to their environment cuts them off from the world around them. This refusal to connect turns toxic.
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