Rachel Evans

Beats are a toilet or park where men gather to have consensual, casual sex.

While celebrations over Barack Obama’s victory in the presidential elections dominated US streets, gay rights supporters rallied against the banning of same-sex marriage in California.

To background chants of “The pope is wrong, put a condom on!”, protesters crept past the police lines and handed out condoms to the young Catholics streaming into Sydney’s Randwick Racecourse for World Youth Day (WYD).

Pope Benedict XVI is coming to town. Sydney is once again to be subject to a special police regime as this saintly, celibate white man bravely preaches the joys of sexual abstinence in the very Circus Maximus of Sin City (Randwick race course).

A Chinese man, Pang Pang, was deported back to Tian Jing province last week from Sydney’s Villawood detention centre. After he had been placed into State 1 at Villawood — the immigration prison’s maximum security area — he had asked to see his case officer. No-one came to see him for two weeks, and he was subsequently deported.

The Rudd government has been rejecting asylum seeker claims at an extraordinary rate. A report by the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre (ASRC), released on May 4, revealed that out of 42 ministerial decisions over five weeks, 41 appeals had been rejected — a 97.6% rejection rate.

On April 28, Labor PM Kevin Rudd’s government began to deport asylum seekers, beginning with a Chinese woman. The next day, two Indian men were placed in stage 1 of the Villawood immigration detention centre for preparation for deportation.

On April 28, Labor PM Kevin Rudd’s government began to deport asylum seekers, beginning with a Chinese woman. The next day, two Indian men were placed in stage 1 of the Villawood immigration detention centre for preparation for deportation. One of the men has been held in detention for six years. He was also among the 61 long-term detainees whose cases Labor immigration minister Chris Evans had promised to review by the end of April.

On February 1 the Bolivian government introduced its “dignity pension” — a pension payment for those over 60 years-old that is a first of its kind in Bolivia.

Celebrations of the two year anniversary of the coming to power of left-wing President Evo Morales — Bolivia’s first ever indigenous president, elected on the back of mass movements to overturn neocolonialism — occurred in La Paz on January 22.