“We have three priorities”, United Nations secretary-general Ban Ki-moon told a January 21 media conference on Haiti with former US President Bill Clinton.
Tony Iltis
On January 13, Rupert Murdoch’s US network FoxNews claimed that while the US “was leading [the] international relief effort in Haiti”, Cuba was “conspicuously absent from the roster of helping hands”.
Right-wing columnist David Brooks began his January 15 New York Times piece by reminding his readers that when, in October 1989, the San Francisco Bay Area was hit by an earthquake similar in magnitude to the one that devastated Haiti on January 12, the death toll was 63.
Five Tamil refugees from Sri Lanka, held at Christmas Island, face indefinite imprisonment without trial after Australia’s secret police agency, ASIO, deemed them “security risks”.
More than 1400 activists from 43 countries travelled to Egypt to mark the first anniversary of Israel's December 2008-January 2009 assault on the Palestinian Gaza Strip.
The Indian Mail Today cartoon that has so outraged Australian politicians was a response to Australian authorities’ claims that the spate of murders and assaults against Indian nationals in Australia was “not racially motivated”.
In February 2008 — at the first session of parliament after he won government — Prime Minister Kevin Rudd delivered a moving apology to the Stolen Generations, the Aboriginal children abducted from their families last century as part of a policy of social engineering to extinguish the Aboriginal identity.
On November 25, the federal Labor government tabled legislation in parliament to allow the extension of the policy of “welfare quarantining” to unemployed people and single parents throughout the country regardless of ethnic background.
Were it not so outrageous, it could almost be funny. A 12-year-old Aboriginal boy was brought before a Western Australian court on a charge of receiving stolen goods. He had accepted a chocolate Freddo Frog worth 70 cents from a friend who had allegedly stolen it.
National Party leader Senator Barnaby Joyce has sought political capital by promoting an even harder line than the Rudd government on Tamil refugees. “Send the Oceanic Viking to Colombo and you will have made a strong statement”, Joyce told the Nine Network on November 8 about the 78 Tamil people refusing to leave the Australian custom ship to be imprisoned in Indonesia’s Tanjung Pinang Detention Centre.
On November 2, Hamid Karzai began another term as president of Western-occupied Afghanistan after being officially declared the winner in an election so blatantly fraudulent that his main opponent, Abdullah Abdullah, refused to take part in it any longer.
A three-day official visit of US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Pakistan occurred against a backdrop of carnage. Within hours of her arrival on October 28, a car bomb exploded in a crowded market in Peshawar, capital of the North West Frontier Province (NWFP).
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